This Year's Model

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (C) - Luca Guadagnino returns to the Italian countryside but he crashes and burns with his follow-up to "A Bigger Splash" -- ponderous James Ivory mush about a summer gay romance in 1983.

Armie Hammer plays Oliver, a bland preppy hunk invited to spend the summer as this year's research assistant to an art professor who spends the season in paradise with his wife and their pouty, brooding 17-year-old son, Elio (Timothee Chalamet from "Lady Bird"). Oliver sends a few signals Elio's way in the gay code of the unenlightened times and, after a few false starts, soon the bright young teen is tossing aside his girlfriend and chasing after Oliver.

Thus begins an endless string of flirtations, moody glances, horseplay and sappy cooings that would make tween girls roll their eyes. In fact, each guy has a woman on the side, but they treat the gals like the filmmakers do, as props. (One of the girls (Esther Garrel) is French, for no apparent reason.)

Michael Stuhlbarg, as the father-professor, does little more than read lines to advance the plot and pore over the daily Corriere della Sera with his espresso. His wife (Amira Casar) apparently inherited the mansion, where the couple also spends winter holidays. (The movie tries to make something of the family and Oliver being Jewish but it's not clear why it should even matter.)

Stuhlbarg does pull off a touching (if overly mannered) monologue at the climax of the film, but he also suffers through a critical scene at the halfway mark of the movie, the point where things quickly go downhill. Stuhlbarg is hanging with Oliver, pontificating as they catalog slides of classic statutes of male nudes (subtle, eh?). "Hence their ageless ambiguity," Stuhlbarg intones, perhaps stifling a Groucho waggle of his eyebrows (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), "as if they're daring you to desire them." Green light engaged.

Chalamet is fairly riveting throughout, his soft features and gaunt sensuality undercut by a biker's sneer and a jock's gait. Elio is a brilliant boy -- he reads voraciously and transcribes classical music into sheet music. Who wouldn't find him appealing? But he spends too much of the movie moping, and a final extended shot of him expressing his emotions as the credits role is intended to be one for the ages, but it goes on so long that it verges on the silliness of a "Police Squad" spoof.

In fact, the tone is off the whole film, which lasts an interminable 2 hours 12 minutes. It's as if Guadagnino reshuffled some scenes from "A Bigger Splash" -- like courtyard dinners with friends, full of snappy high-brow conversation and sexual innuendo -- but he misplaced his ability to craft a coherent, compelling narrative. Storylines here seem like they are caught in a loop. Elio likes to touch Oliver and then smell his own fingers, or he huffs Oliver's clothes, to dramatically savor what he knows is likely only a six-week romance. There is an inordinate number of glimpses of feet. Elio also has a solo moment with a piece of fruit, in a scene that nods to "American Pie," except here it's laughable instead of funny. In another inadvertent parody, when we finally get around to a sex scene between Elio and Oliver, just as things heat up in bed, Guadagnino does a slow pan out the bedroom window and settles solemnly on a big leafy tree, as if he were modestly directing soft-core porn for HBO. ("Blue Is the Warmest Color" this ain't.) The Ivory of the screenplay is, of course, the man from the famed Merchant-Ivory movies of the '80s, a time when it was dignified to adapt E.M. Forster novels, so the shadings here are not much of a surprise.

As things drag on, the men play cat and mouse, but once they finally go all in, they sneak around -- it's the early '80s after all -- though you get the sense that no one besides their girlfriends would care much about the homo-erotic happenings, not even Elio's apparently enlightened and supportive (indulgent?) parents. The men romp through the gorgeous countryside -- Oliver dapper in his crisp shirts, short shorts and white socks, a uniform of the era -- gamboling about while a couple of smarmy Sufjan Stevens songs bleat in the background. Hammer's Jon Hamm impersonation gets stale quickly, and you wonder what a dynamo like Elio sees in such an empty vessel, a discarded statue.

"Call Me by Your Name" might have been a heartfelt novel, but it's a jumble of bad ideas on the big screen, a serious misstep following the best film of 2016.

BONUS TRACK
Our title track, sort of -- Elvis Costello with the appropriately descriptive opening track from "This Year's Model":