If you read the Andre Aciman novel, you know that Elio’s story does not end the way Call Me By Your name concludes. Cue director Luca Guadagnino’s plan for the sequel.

Last fall word of mouth was already building for the spring/summer romance between Elio and Oliver that stars Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Now that Call Me By Your Name is doing a respectable business at the box office and looks like a strong contender in the Oscar race, Guadagnino is letting fans of the film know what he is considering for the sequel.

As those who’ve read the novel well know, the Aciman tale is set in 1987, when the world was fully in the grip of an AIDS epidemic. In order to preserve the purity of the Elio/Oliver love affair, Guadagnino moved the clock on his film back to 1983 — only three years after stories about a mysterious “gay cancer” began making headlines.

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The sequel, says Guadagnino, will dive headlong into the crisis — and he hopes that the second film will be another installment of a long-running series. Speaking at Jan. 13’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards last week, the director told the press, “I think it’s going to be a very relevant part of the story.”

Guadagnino pictures an older Elio as a cinephile, “and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More,” a 1988 film about a man who falls in love with a man after he leaves his wife, which was the first French movie to deal with AIDS. “That,” said Guadagnino, “could be the first scene.”

In addition, he pointed out that the novel has 40 pages in its conclusion that detail the next 20 years of the lives of the central characters, “so there is some sort of indication through the intention of author Andre Aciman that the story can continue,” said Guadagnino. “In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?”

Guadagnino concluded, “In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie.” And that movie could be in theaters by 2020.



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Last modified: July 25, 2019