Call Me By Your Name remains Luca Guadagnino‘s most famous film, and that’s saying a lot, given his consistent output of great movies.
One of the most valid criticisms Call Me By Your Name received was regarding its handling of the sex scene between Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer).
“I thought those were salacious comments by superficial people”
Despite showing several of Elio’s (heterosexual and peachsexual) sexual exploits without restraint, viewers have to use their imagination when Elio and Oliver become intimate.
The camera pans outside and focuses on the tree outside.
This criticism has followed him for years, and in a conversation with Variety while talking about his latest directorial undertaking, Queer, Guadagnino reacts to comments about the lack of gay sex in Call Me By Your Name.
“I never really clicked with the negative comments about the lack of sex on-screen in Call Me by Your Name. I thought those were salacious comments by superficial people. And it pains me that a few of these comments come from people that I worship very dearly.
“This idea that there was a sort of negation of gay sex in the film, it’s ludicrous. When you make a movie, the only thing that rules the movie is the movie itself. And anyone who wants to put an agenda on top of the movie itself is stupid.”
“In Call Me by Your Name, you had to leave the curtain closed for the lovers to explore their idyll. In the case of Queer, this is a movie about the fever dream of connection and disconnection,” he continued, contrasting his most popular film with his latest one.
Queer is set to feature explicit gay sex scenes, a welcome change in Guadagnino’s filmography.
Luca Guadagnino Trolls ‘CMBYN’s Critics in ‘Queer’
Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire caught Queer at the Venice Film Festival.
In his review, he notes that the film features some very graphic gay sex scenes between Daniel Craig‘s Lee and Drew Starkey‘s Allerton.
“They go to bed in two feverishly charged, sensually filmed encounters that are the most explicit gay sex scenes I can remember in any mainstream movie,” Lattanzio writes.
Curiously, the sex scenes are almost identical to Elio and Oliver’s in Call Me By Your Name in one aspect.
The film briefly pans out a window.
But instead of trees, it cuts back to Lee and Allerton as they screw harder than rabbits on heat.
In Guadagnino’s Italian honesty, this means, “Now what? Find something else to criticize.”
Queer made its debut at Venice Film Festival. It was acquired by arthouse powerhouse A24 for distribution. It doesn’t have a US theatrical date yet.