The Director of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ Is Already Sketching Out an HIV-Centered Sequel
Peach lovers rejoice! Luca Guadagnino, the gay director of the bisexual romance movie Call Me By Your Name (CMBYN), has reportedly sketched the beginning of a CMBYN sequel. And those who criticized the film for existing in a non-political dream world may be happy to know that a Call Me By Your Name sequel will occur during the HIV epidemic.
While André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name was set in 1987 during the HIV epidemic, Guadagnino’s film adaptation shifted it to 1983, two years after the virus was first detected.
What would a Call Me By Your Name sequel look like?
Guadagnino’s hypothetical sequel would tackle the epidemic head on. He envisioned how a sequel might open with The Hollywood Reporter:
“I think Elio [the young man played Timothee Chalamet] will be a cinephile and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More,” a 1988 film about a man who falls in love with a man after he leaves his wife, which was the first French movie to deal with AIDS. “That,” said Guadagnino, “could be the first scene [in the sequel].”
Aciman’s novel concludes with 40 pages covering the next two decades in the lives of Elio and Oliver, the book’s central same-sex couple. To Guadagnino, this indicates that their story can continue, making CMBYN the first possible installment in an ongoing series spanning decades in the characters’ lives, somewhat like the Before Sunrise film series.
Guadagnino said:
Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?
At the end of CMBYN (spoiler alert), Oliver returns to the U.S. and marries a woman. It’ll be interesting to see if the two re-kindle their romance.
