Summary
Inside, Mr. Perlman tells Elio to put on the shirt that Mounier and Isaac gave him, and scolds him for not being accepting of them for being gay. "Is it because they're gay or because they're ridiculous?" Perlman asks him.
At dinner, Mounier and Isaac laugh with Mrs. Perlman and Elio comes out in his shirt. Later, he plays the piano, excusing himself to go to bed afterwards. While he pees in the bathroom upstairs, Oliver walks past him and says, "Do I know you?" Elio hears his parents laughing with the older gay couple and bidding them farewell. In the dark, he goes onto Oliver's balcony, where he finds Oliver smoking a cigarette. Oliver puts his hand on Elio's and says, "I'm glad you came."
Inside, Oliver and Elio begin to seduce each other, embracing and holding one another. "Can I kiss you?" asks Oliver, to which Elio replies, "Yes please." When Oliver slams the door, Elio gets anxious that someone will hear them. They sit on the bed and Elio puts his foot on top of Oliver's. "Does this make you happy?" Oliver asks Elio, and they kiss and have sex.
We see their naked bodies entwined after intercourse. "Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine," whispers Oliver in the dark, and they do. Elio notices Oliver's shirt on the ground, noting that it is the one he wore on his first day there. "Will you give it to me when you go?" he asks.
The next day, Oliver and Elio wake up in each other's arms. Elio gets up and smiles at Oliver, inviting him to go swimming. They ride bicycles and go for a swim, swimming far away from each other. Afterwards, Oliver asks Elio, "Are you going to hold what happened last night against me?" and Elio shrugs and says, "No."
Back at the house, Oliver looks at the bed that they shared and calls Elio into the room. He orders Elio to take his bathing suit off, which Elio does. Then, Oliver gets on his knees and takes Elio in his mouth, before standing up abruptly, praising Elio for getting erect so easily, and shutting the door in his face with a laugh.
Later that day, Oliver sits at a picnic table holding his book, and Elio comes and joins him and his parents for lunch, sitting beside Oliver. As Elio sits, Oliver says he needs to go into town and leaves.
Elio follows Oliver into town, telling him, "I just wanted to be with you." Oliver says to Elio, "Do you know how happy I am that we slept together?" but Elio admits, "I don't know."
Oliver says, "I don’t want you to regret any of it. I don’t want either of us to have to pay one way or another," and tells Elio that he wishes he could kiss him.
Later, back at the house, Elio picks a peach from a tree and eats it, hugging his mother on the way to his bedroom. Upstairs, Elio reads on a mattress in the attic area, before picking up the peach, poking a hole in it, pulling out the pit, and masturbating with it. Having ejaculated into the peach, he puts it on the chest beside his bed and rolls over on the mattress.
That evening, Oliver comes and finds Elio and begins kissing his body, before performing oral sex on him. As he tastes him, he asks, "What did you do?" then finds the peach on the chest nearby, laughing. "I'm sick, aren't I?" Elio says, ashamed. "I wish everybody was as sick as you," Oliver counters, before going to bite the peach. Elio fights him, before breaking into sobs of shame and confusion. Oliver holds him as he cries, then kisses him tenderly to comfort him. "I don't want you to go," Elio says to Oliver, embracing him.
That night, Elio talks about the fact that they wasted so many days not beginning their affair. "Why didn't you give me a sign?" he asks Oliver, to which Oliver replies, "I did!" Oliver tells him that the day he was playing volleyball he touched Elio to show him that he liked him, but Elio looked at him with skepticism at the time. They kiss.
The next morning, Elio awakens to find that Oliver is already up. At the foot of his bed, he finds the shirt that he asked Oliver to give him when he left, and a note that says, "For Oliver, from Elio."
Outside, Elio runs into Marzia, who asks where he's been, and he tells her he had to work. She asks him, "Am I your girl?" but Elio just shrugs.
Sitting in chairs on the lawn, Perlman tells his wife that Oliver is going to Bergamo to do some research at the university, and she suggests that perhaps Elio should go with him so they can spend some time together before Oliver leaves. Perlman takes her hand in agreement.
The scene shifts and Elio goes on the bus with Oliver. Just as the bus pulls away, Chiara pulls up on her bicycle, and Oliver waves to her, ambivalently. As they leave the bus station, Mrs. Perlman invites Chiara and Marzia to dinner that night.
Analysis
The arrival of Mounier and Isaac highlights the contradiction with which Elio is contending emotionally. In spite of the fact that he is falling more and more for Oliver, an older man, he looks down on Isaac and Mounier, two gay men who are living openly. The contradiction is at once puzzling and completely understandable, as it shows the viewer that Elio's unresolved feelings about his own homosexuality have led him to be dismissive of the homosexuality of others. He projects his own insecurity and self-loathing onto the easiest target: the men who are living as he wishes he could live with Oliver. While Perlman alludes to the fact that the couple is "ridiculous," Elio latches on to this fact about them and uses it as a reason to disrespect them behind their back.
Guadagnino rarely shoots anyone's faces in close-up, choosing to shoot from a distance, or in close-up on characters' backs. For instance, in the scene in which Elio finds Oliver on the balcony, we do not see the older academic's face as he tells Elio he's glad to see him and puts his hand on his. Rather, we see his hand rest on top of Elio's, tenderly stroking it. In this way, their love is still hidden to the viewer, made all the more charged and erotic by the fact that we see their physicality rather than their expression.
It is in this section that Oliver and Elio finally physically consummate their love for one another, passionately embracing and having sex one night. They feverishly peel off each other's clothes and kiss in the darkness of their room. Perhaps because they are emboldened by the visit of an openly gay couple to the house, perhaps because they could not prevent themselves any longer, the two men allow themselves to unleash their passion for one another.
After they have had sex, Oliver speaks the words that are the film's title, when he tells Elio, "Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine." In this moment, the film suggests that love and desire are as much about a desire to embrace and touch another from without as it is to merge with and become the other. For Oliver, his attraction to Elio is about his admiration for him, his desire to become him, and through the ritual of calling the other by their own name, they simulate a becoming, a coalescence between them.
Elio is at a stage of development in which his adolescent sexuality is brimming over at all times, as exemplified in the moment when he masturbates using a pitted peach. He is so turned on by the world, so in touch with his own eros, that he penetrates a ripened fruit as if it were a sexual partner. His extreme libidinousness is accompanied with an equally adolescent shame, a sense that his urges and his actions are inherently wrong. When Oliver teases him for being so lusty, turned on by Elio's unusual desires, and goes to eat the peach, Elio erupts in a fit of sobbing, mourning his lost innocence and ashamed of his sexual appetite.
