Day: June 4, 2017

A strange moment for me in Manarola, 3:35 am and unable to sleep, having woken at 2:30 am after dropping off for a 30-minute nap around 8 pm. I’m now sitting in a tiny stone foyer with no wall plugs, no lights….just a round plastic table and two plastic beach chairs. In the dark.

Manarola’s sea vistas are stunning and nourishing, of course, and I love the constant sound of crashing, pounding surf below.  But otherwise this is an amiable but second-rate, hand-to-mouth tourist town, and by that I mean catering almost entirely to under-30 types as older folks have apparently been scared off by the steep staircases. I for one bounded up via Belvedere like an antelope. Actually I’m lying — the stairs are a bitch.

Local merchants, their survival requiring a constant seduction of 20somethings and their modest incomes, have made Manarola into a tourist destination for this subset — young couples, backpackers, student groups, families on a budget. Our little place, located up high with a breathtaking view, cost me a couple of hundred per night, but most of the hotels are cheaper. 

The ristorantes, trattorias and osterias have struck me as nothing special (good enough, reasonably priced), but there doesn’t seem to be anything that even begins to resemble La Lampara. Plus there isn’t a decent small market in the area.

Whenever a vacation town has a great, drop-dead selling point that everyone will succumb to (smashing surf, an eye-filling horizon), the locals never try to build it into anything more.  Because they don’t have to and they know it. 

Ten years ago Jett and I visited Monterosso, which is larger with a few more resources and a small beach. I think I prefer that Cinque Terre town to this one.

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A note to Luca Guadagnino, typed around 3:30 am: “Thanks to you and Guipy for the wonderful three-hour lunch, which Tatyana and I will never, ever forget. I’m very sorry we couldn’t manage to visit your palazzo in Crema. La Lampara was a truly perfect setting, homey and simple, an exquisite little family business, etc. Our lunch was private, of course, but I feel I have to at least minimally account for my whereabouts on Sunday. So I’ll be mentioning that we met and lunched, and that the great-looking Call Me By Your Name poster will be out soon, and also that great line about ‘family’ and perhaps a mention of how Rio, the Jake Gyllenhaal-Benedict Cumberbatch thriller you’ll be shooting next year, will actually be shot in Sri Lanka, etc. Thanks so much again. A truly lovely interlude. Thanks for everything. Catch you again during the early fall festivals.”

Luca Guadagnino at La Lampara — Sunday, 6.4, 4:15 pm.

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During Sunday’s sublime outdoor lunch at La Lampara, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino mentioned a kind of selling point about his brilliant film, which premiered to ecstatic raves during last January’s Sundance Film Festival and which Sony Pictures Classics will open on 11.24 — about as Oscar-baity a release date as you can get.

Call Me By Your Name is, yes, a first-love film, an early ’80s gay romance and a sensual, laid-back Italian summer dreamscape. But it connects in a more fundamental way, Luca said and which I fully agree with, with family values, which is to say father-son values, extended-family values, community values…we’re all together in this.

For the film is not so much about a one-on-one relationship (although that is certainly a central thread) as much as how the hearts and minds of a small, mostly English-speaking community in northern Italy (the film was primarily shot in Guadagnino’s home town of Crema) observe, absorb, feed into, comment upon and nourish in little affecting ways the central, slow-build love story between Timothy Chalamet and Armie Hammer. You could describe the basic dynamic along the lines of “you guys are engaged in an emotional adventure but we’re also involved in a sense because we’re family and we care.”

Posted by Esquire‘s Tyler Coates on 1.26.17: “First loves are the hardest to shake, as evidenced in the film’s closing moments. Never before has a movie treated an inevitable loss with such dignity and beauty, both through a stunning monologue delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Elio’s father, and a final, several-minute-long shot of Elio’s face as he contemplates his summer romance and, surely, what it means for the future. We may know what happens next — Eliot will surely love again — but Guadagnino places the most importance on the present, an emotional limbo full of sadness and joy, grief and hope.

“It’s enough to erase all of the movies you’ve loved before, as it’s impossible not to feel seduced and broken by what Guadagnino pulls off. The film will leave you devastated, but the memory of its exuberant 130 minutes will last a lifetime.”

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It’s 5:10 am right now, and I’m sitting in a pitch-dark, no-wall-outlet foyer in a Manarola rooming house (laughingly referred to as a kind of “hotel” but not in my book), the only light coming from the unplugged Macbook Pro and with the Mediterranean surf smashing and churning outside.

With the exception of a delightful four-person, three-hour lunch with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Gudagnino at La Lampara, a coastal restaurant outside La Spezia, I spent almost all of Sunday driving and searching for parking and dragging suitcases up steep stone staircases, and then taking a brief nap at 8 pm only to awake six and half hours later.

Which is partly why, at this juncture, I’ve almost nothing to say about the forthcoming, four-night Putin Interviews (Showtime, 6.12, 9 pm). I’m racing to finish three or four posts before the computer battery dies, and the wifi sucks and my ass hurts from sitting on a shitty little plastic chair.

Will the always interesting Oliver Stone go easy on the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, a skillfully deceptive alpha male who — be honest — commands a thoroughly corrupt government, has almost certainly had journalists and enemies killed, has suppressed free speech and will continue to do so, still supports the fiendish Assad regime? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s safe to say Stone probably won’t be as flinty as Megyn Kelly was during her recent conversation with Putin. I’m presuming that the Stone-Putin thing will be somewhat more interesting, at least in terms of a potential cat-and-mouse dynamic, Stone asking or not asking certain questions and Putin dodging like a champ either way.

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