Fans of Timothée Chalamet have a double dose of good news as Warner Bros. UK recently released a teasertrailer forBones & All, a romantic cannibal road trip movie that reunites the fledgling movie star with director Luca Guadagnino, who made the actor an Academy Award-nominated leading man back in 2017 withCall Me By Your Name. On top of this, Guadagnino expressed his desire to make aCall Me By Your Namesequelwith Chalamet, who has frequently expressed interest in such a project.
But rather than labeling it as a sequel, Guadagnino would prefer to call it by another name. During an interview withIndieWireat the Telluride Film Festival, promotingBones & All, the Italian director said, “A sequel is an American concept.” Guadagnino wants to make “… the chronicles of Elio [Chalamet’s character], the chronicles of this young boy becoming a man.” Who, then, will write this sequel that isn’t a sequel, the so-called “Chronicles of Elio”?
Filmmaker James Ivory, the legendary right-brain of Merchant-Ivory Productions who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his work on André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name, said he would not return to pen aCall Mesequel. In 2018, Ivory told The Film Stage, “I can’t imagine having to make Timothée Chalamet look 45. I mean, that would be horrendous and so fake looking if that’s what they are going to do!” Ivory’s comments were in solidarity with theCall Me By Your Namenovelist André Aciman who was also opposed to a sequel at the time. But just one year later, Aciman released a sequel novel entitled,Find Me(2019), much to the delight of both Guadagnino and Chalamet, butnot necessarily literary critics.
James Ivory Is Unlikely to Return to Adapt the Screenplay
Even if Ivory had expressed interest, he is currently ninety-four years old, making the chances of his involvement pretty slim. Ivory or no Ivory, Guadagnino is more likely to make an adaptation of André Aciman’s sequel novelFind Methan to commission a screenwriter to write an original screenplay. to preserve the Merchant-Ivory magic in theCall Me By Your Namefilm adaptation, there will have to be cuts from Aciman’s sequel novelFind Mesimilar to those which Ivory made from Aciman’s original novelCall Me.
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InFind Me, Aciman brings readers back into the lives of the main characters fromCall Me By Your Namewith four episodic love affairs split into chapters of varying length. In the first and longest chapter Samuel Perlman (the father characterplayed brilliantly by Michael StulhbarginCall Me) takes a train from Florence to Rome. En route to visit his now-adult son, Elio, who has become a career classical pianist, Samuel has an affair with a much younger woman, Miranda, whom he meets on the train.
Another chapter concerns Oliver (played by Armie Hammer inCall Me), now a family man and professor, still living in New England but dreaming of a return trip to Europe. At a party, Oliver flirts with a man and a woman, who, if combined into one person, he believes would add up to Elio. The final and shortest chapter features Elio and Oliver back together, raising Samuel and Miranda’s child, meaning that Elio is raising his half-sibling with his older lover from many years ago.
The Second Chapter of Find Me Will Most Likely Form the Basis of a Sequel Film
It is almost certain that none of these chapters will make the cut in a film adaptation. Ivory would easily cut all of these out since he already cut similar episodic chapters from Aciman’s bookCall Me By Your Name, including a similar ending from the first book. In an interview at TIFF in 2018, James Ivory said:
“… The first thing that I did [on theCall Mescreenplay]… I told Luca [Guadagnino]…‘I don’t wanna have the ending of the book. I want to end the story at the height of emotion and feeling in the story. I don’t wanna move on to twenty-five years and come back to these characters who were then sort of raking over the ashes of their first love.’ I thought that that was kind of a downer.”
So if three out of the four chapters from the novelFind Meare likely to be scrapped by Guadagnino to preserve the Merchant-Ivory magic of the first film, what is left from the sequel novel for the filmmaker to put up on screen?
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In the second chapter ofFind Me,the reader finds Elio some time after his time in Rome, now living in Paris, where he meets Michel, an older and attractive Frenchman, during intermission at a chamber music concert. The two quickly form a bond over a shared love of classical music that was given to them by their fathers, who both taught them music. Only a couple of hours after the concert, Elio finds himself playing the same kinds of flirtatious games with Michel that he once played with Oliver.
Here is the first of such exchanges:
“You’re blushing,” [Michel] said.
“No, I’m not.” [Elio said.]
[Michel] gave an amused, disbelieving glance from across the table. “Are you sure?”
[Elio] thought for a few seconds and then gave in. “I guess I am, aren’t I?”
[Elio] was young enough to hate being read so easily, especially during an awkward silence with someone who was close to twice [his] age, but [Elio] was sufficiently grown-up to welcome having a blush say something [he] was reluctant to disclose. Then [Elio] looked at [Michel].
“You’re blushing too,” [Elio] said.
(Aciman 121).
That little dialogue scene alone could begin the trailer for a film adaptation ofFind Me. The odds are that the second chapter of the book, which runs roughly 90 pages (feature-length screenplays have been adapted from far less), is the film that audiences might actually be seeing in the coming years: Elio and Michel, falling in love in late 1990s Paris, the classical music, the fatherly nostalgia.
Armie Hammer Is Even Less Likely to Return for Find Me
ExpandingFind Me’s second chapter into an entire film would kill two birds with one stone. The narrative replacement of the Oliver character with Michel would effectively cut Armie Hammer out of the picture. This is a bonus for Guadagnino and any cancel-wary producers who would be fighting an uphill battle in sellingFind Mewith Hammer’s name on the poster, especially since Guadagnino recently pleaded for the public to stop comparing the fictional cannibalism in his upcoming film,Bones & All, with the bizarre cannibal allegations against Armie Hammer; a subject which is to receive a film adaptation of its own in the upcoming ID & Discovery+true crime special,House of Hammer.
