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I want to talk about Donald Glover. He’s been here the whole time, right under my nose, but I never really saw him until this week. He’s the actor/musician/writer/comedian/DJ/producer everybody already loves and it’s incredibly off-brand for me to be so late to a party. I’m not always there when you call, but I’m always on time.

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I’m not even fashionably late on this one, I’m white rabbit panic stations late. I’m behind on all the groundwork you’ve done watching Atlanta, with its Lynchian surrealism, and reading Glover’s New Yorker profiles, and listening to Childish Gambino on the cross trainer. I know you saw him in Star Wars. And at the Grammys. And his episodes of Girls. And his SNL stand-up. But for me, like oil on water, he didn’t quite sink in.

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The game changer was last week’s snap of Glover with Rihanna — the patron saint of IDGAF. Seared onto my retina is his Baywatch look of lifesaver red shorts with a gold chain, an ensemble that characterises his brand precisely: nerdy and exuberant. In pictures, he’s forever completely out of place, lost-looking, and yet utterly at home. He’s always part science nerd, part human thirst trap, part hapless stoner. A contradiction, Glover is the guy who takes you to the Met Ball in a purple Gucci suit and sassy white loafers and also grittily pens the most politically charged songs of the year.

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I saw all the commotion over "This Is America" of course. You’d have to be in a coma to miss that one. But I was incredibly distracted by his trousers. Politics, race relations and gun violence aside, Glover’s Confederate States Army trousers had presence. The best outfit in the world for a man or woman is just slacks. Straight up, well-cut slacks. No fancy top, no jazzy shoes. Topless in great slacks is hot. Donald’s trousers are goals.

Trousers crossed my mind this week when confronted on the big screen with four perfect totems of tanned flesh: the legs of Elio and Oliver, central characters in Luca Guadangnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Released last December, the cerebral coming-of-age film was catnip for gay men and we quietly raved about it at our low key yuletide get-togethers. Call Me By Your Canape.

This is my second date with the film, now the hype and hysteria has calmed, working out if it’s as good as I remember. On Instagram you'll have seen the film's surface-level effect as every gay in the village decamped for a summer of love in Europe. It’s set “somewhere in northern Italy” over six weeks of rolling summer, the type found only in fiction, where nobody gets Delhi belly or seasick. The film centres around a burgeoning love, with a healthy side-order of trouser-free leg.

The perfect antidote to Britain's darkening early evenings, the atmosphere of endless Italian summer was credited by director Guadagnino to the genius of the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom: the filming was plagued throughout by downpours. “It was raining, raining, raining. It’s all fake but it’s all good. The piercing wisdom of a Thai Buddhist,” he said.

Call Me By Your name is dexterously aspirational, little tributaries of life goals all converging in its vast lake. The villa is sublimely understated, reeking of both a rarefied effervescent sophistication and cold hard cash. The tri-lingual teenager (English, French, Italian) is unapologetically precocious. ‘The usurper’, Oliver, is so buff he only has to say “Later” for the entire duration of the film. The cultured, caring, cathartic parents eventually steal the show (though there’s stiff competition from a peach).

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There’s a seeming casualness with the framing of each shot, and coupled with the internal dialogue-ness of the script, each scene feels as if we’ve stumbled across people mid-conversation. At times I wanted to apologise for intruding. There’s an ebbing sensual (not exactly sexual) tension perforating each moment, a perpetual sparring loop of mutual self-confidence.

Both characters are cocky and tentative: scholars of themselves and each other. Learned and learning. It’s a gay romance, sure, but it speaks of that heady first-timeness of any green relationship and the wariness you have for someone you fancy the pants off but don’t know yet. The threatening cliff-drop fear of rejection and the void of the complete unknown and uncertain are the purest feelings of anticipation.

Chalamet’s character, Elio, is a gifted guitarist and pianist whose music provides both private solace and shared enjoyment. “That was the biggest part for me”, shares Chalamet. “The Bach variations in the film. I worked with an Italian composer Roberto Solci for about an hour and a half a day, [for] a month and a half in advance of the film.”

Somerset House is a go-to in both sweltering midsummer and deepest midwinter. From ice-skating bruises, to a cinema beneath open skies. Call me by Your Name with a refined picnic hamper by Bryn Williams is the perfect summer evening. Strawberries, chantilly cream, Elio, Oliver. Black truffle crisps, classical archaeology, ancient bronze deities. Smoked salmon, soda bread, the etymology of ‘apricots’. Our hamper has macaroons and a bottle of prosecco too, but I’ve also smuggled in a few cans of Quello sparkling wine and my eyes are misty by the second act.

I keep having to take little emotional breaks, raising my eyes up to the stars above the ornate courtyard and thinking of un-doomed love, and un-precocious teenagers with little or no musical training. I know Elio languidly playing Bach al fresco on the guitar is not worth crying over, yet here I am.