Sympotic Love?: Classical Reception in Call Me by Your Name

Abstract

Luca Guadagnino’s popular 2017 film Call Me by Your Name and André Aciman’s 2007 novel on which the film is based capture the story of a homoerotic summer romance in Italy between a Classics doctoral student of twenty-four and a seventeen-year-old adolescent. Both media present the story of this romance amid a host of classical tropes and allusions, but they each do so in different ways. While the novel engages with the classics in a thoughtful and interpretive way, the film exploits the controversial nature of the age-gap between the two protagonists, Elio (seventeen) and Oliver (twenty-four), alluding to the ancient institution of pederasty as its aesthetic defense. This is especially evident in Guadagnino’s and Aciman’s distinct treatments of Aciman’s “San Clemente Syndrome,” an episode in the book with sustained and pointed allusions to Plato’s Symposium.