Like Hephaistion who died Alexander's lover

[sovay]

I seem to have celebrated Saint Patrick's Day with Haitian food and Italian film. Works for me.

(rushthatspeaks and I got takeout from Pikliz—fried goat with plantains and their levitatingly spicy jerk chicken—and caught the late show of James Ivory and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name (2017) at the Somerville. I am making a note to write about this film, because I just really liked it: it's queer, it's Jewish, it has just the right amount of classical allusions, a simultaneously precise and dreamy sense of place and time and the same attention to the details of a loving and supportive family and an awkward and exhilarating summer of first love, avoiding clichés except for the ones that got that way from being true. I am fascinated by the differences between it and Maurice (1987), the generational shifts in queer film in Ivory's own lifetime and career. I think I owe other movies first.)

Comments

[sovay]

It's wandering in treacherous territory, not so much as a queer romance but because of involving an age and experience difference and being set abroad and all that: I'm glad it avoids clichés.

If you're concerned about either of those factors, the Italian setting is the home of the viewpoint character—the American grad student is the exotic one from away—and the age difference is handled not glossingly but realistically, in that the mid-twenties grad student does not make a move until he's determined that the seventeen-year-old is not just calf-love crushing on him but flirting with awareness and intent. He has to be old enough to know what he's doing and he is. He's old enough for his best-friendship with a girl his own age to flash over into sex. He's not old enough to know how to handle two overlapping relationships gracefully, but even people who aren't seventeen are bad at that. (And it doesn't come out to tragedy either way.)

"Levitatingly" is definitely the sort of approbation I look for when someone's describing spicy food. Sounds delicious.

I have adopted spatch's criterion for spicy food: does it make you see through space and time. Answer here: yes.

[asakiyume]

I wasn't worried for myself! Or for anyone, really--I was just aware that when you tell a story with those elements, problems can come up, and I'm glad to hear that in this case, they don't.

[sovay]

Or for anyone, really--I was just aware that when you tell a story with those elements, problems can come up, and I'm glad to hear that in this case, they don't.

They really don't. It was just lovely. I do want to write about it.