Summary
By the pool, Oliver calls to Elio, who has fallen asleep in a chair. He reads some of his own work aloud to Elio. The passage is, "For the early Greeks, Heidegger contends, this underlying hiddenness is constitutive of the way beings are, not only in relation to themselves but also to other entities generally. In other words, they do not construe hiddenness merely or primarily in terms of entities' relation to human beings.” Oliver tells Elio that what he wrote doesn't make sense, and Elio suggests, "Maybe it did when you wrote it." "That might be the kindest thing anyone's said to me in months," Oliver says, and to Elio's surprise, rolls into the pool with a splash.
At a bar that night, Oliver dances with a woman and Elio and Marzia sit at a table. Elio's companions speculate about whether Oliver is trying to seduce the woman he's dancing with. "Who wouldn't love to be in her shoes?" one of the girls says, commenting on Oliver's attractiveness. Elio looks sullen and smokes a cigarette, watching the couple dance. As they dance, Oliver and the woman begin to kiss.
Suddenly "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs begins to play and Oliver dances to it excitedly. Elio's friends go to dance to the song, but Elio hangs back, saying he'll join them later. After a few moments, Elio goes to the dance floor and dances with Marzia and Oliver.
Later, Marzia and Elio go off and Marzia asks him if he was mad at Chiara for dancing with Oliver. They undress and jump in the river in the moonlight, laughing.
The next morning at breakfast, as Oliver eats an egg, Elio tells his father and Oliver that he almost had sex with Marzia the previous night. "Why didn't you?" asks Perlman, and Oliver suggests that maybe he'll have better luck next time. When Perlman tells the group that he has a lead on some research in a nearby town, something dredged up from the water, Elio asks if he can come along. Perlman agrees, but requests that Elio keep quiet on the trip.
Chiara, the girl with whom Oliver was dancing the night before, pulls up on her bicycle, and asks where Oliver is. Elio tells her that he's going with Perlman to see some research and Chiara asks Elio to tell Oliver she came by. He then tells her that Oliver is inside talking to Perlman, and compliments her on her dancing the previous night. They then talk about the fact that Oliver is a good dancer, and attractive.
Elio goes and gets in the car. As Oliver comes out of the house with Chiara, he kisses her in front of Elio and gets in the car. Elio tells Oliver that Chiara is beautiful and that he saw her naked on a night swim one time. "Trying to get me to like her?" Oliver asks, to which Elio replies, "What would be the harm in that?" and Oliver tells him he doesn't need his help. When Elio gets in, Oliver says, "Just don't play at being a good host."
At the research site, Perlman, Elio, and Oliver go down to the beach and examine an artifact, the arm of a statue that they have dredged up from the ocean. When Perlman goes to talk to someone, Oliver looks at the artifact and Elio holds out his hand, saying, "Truce?" in Italian. Oliver shakes his hand with the statue's hand and smiles.
Elsewhere on the beach, Perlman explains that the ship that the arm is from "went down in 1827 on its way to Isola Del Garda." He explains that the statue was a gift from a man to his lover, and they pull up the statue, a male nude, smiling at it as it emerges from the water.
When the statue is placed on the beach, Elio and Oliver examine it and Perlman says he wants to go for a swim before they go back to the house. The men all swim, splashing each other. We see an ancient ruin and hear Elio and Oliver calling each other's names.
They get back to the house and Elio runs to his bike to go meet Marzia. When he gets to the clearing where they agreed to meet, she is nowhere to be found.
The next morning, Elio plays a simple tune on the piano, then sits on a couch to read "The Cosmic Fragments" by Heraclitus. Inside he finds a handwritten page, a note by Oliver, and we hear Oliver read it in voiceover: "The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing."
Elio goes to Oliver's door, but hears a servant coming, and ducks into his own room. She comes into his room and puts his clean clothes on the bed. When she's gone, Elio goes into Oliver's room and looks at his clothes. He finds Oliver's bathing suit and smells it, then puts it over his head and gets in a sexual pose on the bed. Hearing voices, he leaves the room and goes out to a balcony, where he can see Oliver walking through a nearby field.
During a thunderstorm, Mrs. Perlman sits Elio and Perlman down and translates a German text about a knight in love with a princess, neither of whom cannot admit their love. At the end of the story, the knight asks, "Is it better to speak or die?" Just as she finishes, Elio says, "I'd never have the courage to ask a question like that," and the power goes out. "You do know that you can always talk to us?" Perlman says to his son.
The next day, by the pool, Elio tells Oliver about the story, and tells him about the end of the story: "Better to speak, she said. Buts she's on her guard. She senses a trap somewhere." The knight does not speak, Elio tells him. Oliver says he needs to go to town and pick some things up, and Elio offers to come along. Oliver puts some of his papers in Elio's bag and they head off to town. Oliver shows Elio a scrape that he got from falling, that one of the servants gave him a homeopathic ointment for it.
In town, Oliver goes into a printer to pick something up and offers Elio a cigarette. They look at a monument that Elio identifies as from World War I. He tells Oliver about the Battle of Piave, and the fact that 170,000 people died. "Is there anything you don't know?" Oliver asks him, slyly. Elio replies, "If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter." When Oliver feigns ignorance, Elio says, "You know what things."
"Why are you telling me this?" Oliver asks, and Elio says, "Because I thought you should know...Because I wanted you to know...Because there's no one else I can say this to but you." Oliver looks at him and asks, "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" and Elio nods.
Oliver goes back into the cafe to get his writing, but comes out disappointed, complaining that they mixed up all his pages and he has to retype them. "I shouldn't have said anything," Elio says, and Oliver agrees, telling him, "...we can't talk about those kinds of things." They bike away.
Analysis
A great deal of Oliver and Elio's connection centers around the aesthetic and the intellectual. They are able to speak to one another most fluidly when discussing a piece of music that Elio is playing or a piece of academic writing that Oliver has done. They hardly ever speak to one another personally, but Oliver often uses engaging Elio in intellectual discussion as a way of getting him to speak. Elio, a well-read and precocious teenager, is always taken in by this tactic, and so their connection begins as an intellectual connection as much as an erotic one.
Things become tenser as the two men try to make each other jealous by proving their heterosexuality to one another. At breakfast, Elio announces, rather unceremoniously, that he almost had sex with his girlfriend the night before, in a blatant ploy to make Oliver jealous. Immediately after this, Chiara, the woman with whom Oliver was dancing, comes to the house and Oliver kisses her in front of Elio. The relation between them is tense and annoyed as they try to repress their feelings for one another, using their relationships to women to do so.
Because so much of the desire between the two men is unspoken, the film relies on the longing glances of Elio to broadcast how he feels about Oliver. Director Luca Guadagnino often shoots Timothée Chalamet, the actor playing Elio, in closeup as he watches Oliver. As Elio watches Oliver dance, he smokes and sips a cocktail, brooding and unsure of what to do next, and the closeness aligns the viewer with his erotic frustration and his longing. The dialogue between them is sparse in these sections, so much is left up to the image of their gazes and their attention.
It is significant that the film takes place in Europe, and that Elio's father is an art historian, as his connection to the ancient world acquaints the viewer with an ancient tradition of homosexual affection and love that is embedded in European history. When Elio, Oliver, and Perlman visit the research site, they are delighted by the emergence of an ancient statue of a naked boy, a gift from a count to his lover. The statue represents the history of homosexual love in ancient times, setting a precedent for the attraction between Elio and Oliver. The film suggests that their desire for one another is contextualized by an ancient eros that precedes them.
Even in the moment of confession, Elio and Oliver only allude to their feelings for one another. They speak in ambiguous words about the fact that they're attracted to one another, never saying outright that they are. "Because I wanted you to know?" and "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" make up the bulk of their romantic confession, and they sound almost like they are speaking the language of espionage, rather than of love.
