CMBYN: The Utopic World I Wanted To Live In

A reality we gave up on and does no longer exist

It’s the summer of 1983, the sun is up in the sky, and a little breeze cools these hot days. An absolute silence so hard that it hits everyone in his range. The only things to be heard are the rooster screaming around 6:30 am, the water falling from a little fountain, and the unrelenting bell tower that keeps track of the passing of time. Steadiness dominates this idyllic landscape, making everyday flow like every other one.

Boredom

The biggest characterization of this world comes from the fact that summer is extremely boring. And it is so because school has ended, everybody goes on vacation for a week, and for the rest of the summer break, you have absolutely nothing to do. Mornings and afternoons are the biggest problems because there’s a lot of heat so you don’t have the energies to go out, instead, the nights are more interesting as the temperature is not so high and you can go to parties and meet your friends.

The movie perfectly represents this thing, as Elio lives most of his days playing music and reading books, they don’t have anything else to cure their boredom.

An implausible story in the modern world

Is it possible that a story like “call me by your name” could ever be represented in modern times?

My answer is a big fat NO, that’s completely impossible, for it to happen all the planets in the solar system have to be aligned. There are a few motivations for me to say something so incisive. All the story is based on the boredom of summer times, that’s the base on which the whole thing is built. But today boredom doesn’t exist for people of my age (19 yo), the possibility to be bored was taken away by the advent of social media. If you are bored on a summer day is highly more plausible that you scroll Instagram or TikTok, or you open Netflix or play videogames or whatever. It’s easier to open TikTok and stay on it for hours instead of reading or going out of your comfort zone to meet others.

To destroy this boredom people used to go out, to meet other corpses, and other people like them to share their boredom, but today, for younger generations, is harder than ever. Young folks are incentivized to stay at home in the comfiness of their bedroom instead of going out to meet new people and make new experiences, to have the opportunity to find their true selves, to understand who they are.

Memories are painful

The steadiness of this world was destroyed by the arrival of an American student. These weren’t things that you could see every day, it was pretty unusual. Inside this idyllic world, this new entity attracted the attention of everyone, everyone was curious about who he was, what he was doing, and why he arrived in this little town in Italy.

This curiosity arrived especially from Elio, he wanted to know as much as possible about him, in some kind of way he wanted to become like him, to the point by which he unknowingly fell in love with him. They could live some experiences before the departure of the American kid; Elio and Oliver could try a whole kind of new sensations they never felt before.

But they both knew that this wasn’t enough. With Oliver's departure, Elio felt alone and abandoned. He had to deal with the consciousness that he loved him, and that he wanted to live a lot more experiences with him but he physically couldn't. He was aware of all the love he had that could be consumed. And this desire is the key to a lot of pain, it will become all the nostalgic feelings that you will prove when you will think again to that moment, and it is directly proportional to the joy you felt in those moments.

Elio has to face all of this pain, he has to sit down in front of the fire and cry thinking of all the moments they shared, to overcome it, to accept it. Elio decides to deal with all this pain so he could go on with his life, to be able to love again something or someone else.

It’s easy to relegate this story to a simple romantic story like many others, but it has so much more to say than we can imagine, probably one of the most remarkable masterpieces of the modern world.

I hope my words may have given you something more to reflect on…

If Only You Knew How Little I Really Know About The Things That Matter