This is not a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name. This is not even an article praising the genius of the movie. Instead, this is a simple, pure, unfiltered musing on a movie that means a lot to me.
Never has a movie so perfectly captured my own unique experience of falling in love. The irony is that I'm not alone. All my friends who have seen the movie, and millions of other viewers would agree, that Call Me By Your Name is one of the most honest portrayals of first love this world has to offer. All the second guessing, all the rapid fire, all consuming-thoughts about whether or not the person we are falling for actually likes us too. And all those little glances that hang in space for seemingly forever, our hearts beating faster just at the mere thought that the person we are falling for might just like us back.
It is not easy falling in love, and it is for this reason that is so beautiful to watch Elio fall for Oliver because he does not yet know any better. Elio is still young enough to not have any guards up when falling head first into love. And why should he stop himself? This love is requited. This love is intense. This love is pure. And yet how many times have we stopped ourselves from feeling this way, too afraid of the consequences that might ensue if we truly allowed ourselves to be given over to another person fully?
Watching Elio love without boundary, love despite the fact of how utterly terrifying it is to love another person and to be loved is ineffable. Words simply cannot capture this beauty of humanity. And why should words have to? No matter how many writers and poets try to capture the essence of love, it is futile. But the medium of film can capture all of those moments that cannot be attached to language. If love could be captured merely by words, it would lose its potency, its strength, its magic.
Elio and Oliver have something very special. Such a special bond, in fact, that after watching them, I worry about whether or not I will ever find a love like theirs. I've loved hard in my life, but have never been loved back quite as much. This makes me hurt deep in the basement of my being. I worry that the people I loved couldn't love me back equally because they were simply too scared to.
What a sad life that is to lead. How empty it must be to not be fully alive, to block yourself off from all that life has to offer. And yet we as humans do it all the time. As Elio's father reminds us,
"We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!"I've been told many times that I should feel less. That I'm too emotional. That I love too hard, and how dare I. That I'm too much.
But what kind of life am I leading if I don't? The beauty of being alive is exactly that-- being alive. To be alight with fire in every atom of my being when I look into the eyes of the one I love--that's the definition of being human. Over time, we build up our defenses to the point where we walk around shells of what could have been. And why? Because when it hurts, it just hurts too much?
But how beautiful it is to hurt. How beautiful it is to even have the capacity, the potential, the ability to feel. As Elio watched Oliver leave for good, I remembered how lucky he was to even have loved so profoundly to begin with. So what if it hurt? Their love was, is, worth it.
It's worth it.
It's worth it to feel. It's worth it to be sufficiently alive. And to those that tell you it isn't, they are just terrified of what it would be like to give themselves over fully to life.
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
