The "Goofy Edginess" of Teenagers
How the dance scene from Call Me By Your Name expresses the beauty of teen age
The director Luca Guadagnino once said in an interview that he’s inspired by the “goofy edginess” of teenagers. I know exactly what he means. I share the inspiration. I’m inspired by teenagers’ ability to be both goofy and edgy, light and heavy, completely uninhibited and painfully self-conscious.
It’s a duality we all carry throughout our lives, but it’s born, I think, in teen age, when we first pose life’s big questions but lack the experience necessary to satisfyingly answer them. We spend the rest of our lives gradually poking holes in that overcast sky of questions, letting in the light, accumulating answers, deepening our vision of what’s beyond the clouds — of what, in time, is possible in life.
I’m deeply interested in that overcast sky, in that incipient ennui that teenagers alternately defy and indulge. I’m interested in how that state of consciousness can be depicted on screen. I considered various films to use as a case study here, but Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name kept calling its name to me.
I love the movie for many reasons, but there is a stretch of 14 seconds in the dancing scene that I’ve been unable to forget and feel compelled to elaborate on. The scene occurs relatively early in the film. Elio and Oliver have not yet admitted their feelings toward each other, but their mutual infatuation, especially Elio’s, is clear. Narratively, the scene aims to express Elio’s jealousy as Oliver dances passionately with some other girl. But the scene expresses so much more.
To start, it’s a perfect example of one of Luca Guadagnino’s great gifts as a director, which is his intuitive grasp of the relationship between characters and their environments. He introduces the scene so effortlessly. A shot of a group of friends sitting at a table outdoors, smoking and chatting (Fig A). Then a shot of what they’re looking at: a dance floor (Fig B). Finally, a shot that shows Marzia and Elio joining their crew. The rooted camera pans as Marzia carries drinks from the bar to the table (Fig C) and Elio takes a seat in the foreground (Fig D), visually separated from the rest of his friends. Already we understand the geometry of the space: the bar, the tables, the dance floor. We get the sense that this is a regular, breezy hangout spot in town, a place where romantic politics are negotiated on the dance floor and endlessly gossiped about from the surrounding tables.
Elio’s friends speculate whether Oliver, a visiting grad student, has chosen his mark for the summer, given how locked-in he seems to be with the girl he’s dancing with. Elio, never taking his eyes off Oliver on the dance floor, shrugs it off. The camera isolates its focus on him. We start to enter his mind. Stepping partially into focus, Marzia side-eyes Elio (Fig E), picking up on his latent jealousy (her capacity for intuition will later come to define her character). Elio exhales smoke from his cigarette. Oliver kisses the girl. The table applauds. Elio dies inside.
And then we get The Lean. Elio leans into a tighter close-up (Fig F), with an even shallower depth of field, and, for 14 remarkable seconds, we just watch Elio watching Oliver on the dance floor. In a purely narrative context, the look on his face communicates romantic jealousy, betrayal, longing, disappointment, rejection. But it communicates so much more.
In addition to all of that, I read on Elio’s face the ennui of being seventeen — old enough to feel pain, young enough to believe that it will never, ever abate. I feel, on his behalf, the weary interminability of the summer; the reflexive irritation of hearing other people whisper and speak when only silence will do; the pointlessness of love and longing; the cruelty of two people being unable to share sentience, to be sentient together, in exactly the same way. I feel him feeling all of that. It’s all there, on his face. And when, at 1:08, he shifts his gaze downward, away from Oliver, to look at nothing in particular (Fig G), I feel it all spike in intensity, like the sting of alcohol being placed on a fresh wound.
The camera cuts back to the dance floor, with dancers swaying apocalyptically to the doom of the music. And then? And then the track flips. The DJ raises the tempo. Elio’s friends get up to dance, exhorting him to join them. Elio is startled out of focus, out of his teenage reverie, and tells them he’ll join them later. The Lean ends. Elio reclines back in his chair. He is re-isolated in focus, and the return to medium close-up communicates his connection back to the reality of his environment. He takes a swig of his drink, then one final drag off his cigarette. It’s in that drag that his eyes soften and a smirk sneaks onto his face (Fig H).
The camera cuts to Oliver having the time of his life on the dance floor. The girl he was dancing with is gone. This is clearly a counter-shot. This is Elio’s point of view, admiring an Oliver who is suddenly attainable again. Their subliminal game of infatuation is back on. The camera eases back a little and, in a brilliant move that consistently makes me grin, Elio insinuates himself into the frame, circling Marzia, body-rolling up to the camera, then throwing himself back into the chaotic mix of the dance floor. It’s youth on celluloid. It’s liberation from pain. It’s the culmination of a masterful scene, guided by simple camera placement and depth of field, and anchored by a raw and charismatic performance from Timothée Chalamet.
It’s inspiration. It’s a beautiful expression of young people’s ability to quickly transition from edginess to goofiness, from low to high, from pain to pleasure — because, no matter how low their lows, they’re still young and, therefore, compelled by life to fly.
May we all travel the roads from low to high as if we were Elio, as if we were still seventeen.