These new films may deserve their formal plaudits, but their progressiveness is very much up for debate.Ĭall Me by Your Name, based on the beloved novel by Andrè Aciman, focuses on Elio Perlman (Chalamet), the 17-year-old son of an antiquities professor who during the summer of 1983 welcomes 24-year-old American apprentice Oliver (Armie Hammer) to his enviable, if musty, home in northern Italy. And their polite, glancing treatment of same-sex sex actually feels like a retreat from the sexual frankness of earlier trailblazers like Brokeback Mountain, Shortbus, and Blue Is the Warmest Color. Yet while the critical success of these films may auger a readier embrace of movies about same-sex relationships in general, the actual narratives of Moonlight and Call Me by Your Name in particular reveal a stubborn resistance-even among pedigreed and “challenging” indies-to depicting same-sex romances defined by romance rather than repression, obsession, and torment.