This is an excerpt, read the whole article on the 3rd number (year 2025) of our magazine
Questo è un estratto, leggi l’articolo per intero sul numero 3 anno 2025 della nostra rivista
Film production in recent decades seems to have been characterized by an increasingly frequent use of multilingualism. According to a number of scholars in Film Studies and Audiovisual Translation Studies, the use of multiple languages in film products has played a predominant role, thus reproducing on the screen the language diversity of our contemporary world. The coexistence of different languages has become a vehicle of narration in contemporary cinema, not only in arthouse films, but also in “mainstream” productions (O’Sullivan 2011). In the past, on the other hand, cinema has long been characterized by the dominance of the English language, and audiences were accustomed to seeing films, especially Hollywood productions, where all the characters, even those from non-English speaking countries, spoke standard English.
As audiovisual translation scholar Jorge Díaz Cintas (2011: 217) rightly points out, respect for linguistic verisimilitude and language diversity did not seem to be a concern for most filmmakers in the last century. In recent decades, however, there has been a real “multilingual turn” (Meylaerts 2006: 2), which has led to greater realism in language uses on screen (Dwyer 2005). Indeed, as Wahl (2005: 2) claims, one of the main distinctive features of multilingual films is their “anti-illusionist” nature. In other words, multilingual films are a reflection of society and do not try to conceal linguistic and cultural diversity, but, on the contrary, emphasize it to convey different meanings. A multilingual film is such because, compared to other films, it includes a greater number of spoken languages, and also because it respects “the cultural ‘aura’ and the individual voices of the actors” (Wahl 2008), thus offering a true-to-life linguistic representation of the characters. However, some multilingual films, such as Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, not only reflect the emerging linguistic complexity of contemporary society, but also use language diversity, even emphasizing it, to convey particular narrative meanings.
[…]
Call Me by Your Name: a multilingual film
Call Me by Your Name (2017, Italian title: Chiamami col tuo nome), directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, is characterized as a multilingual film. Set in the summer of 1983 in northern Italy, it sees the protagonist, Elio Perlman, a seventeen-year-old Italian American, spending his vacation at his family’s villa, spending his days transcribing and playing classical music, reading books, and flirting with his French friend Marzia. Into this quiet daily routine bursts Oliver, a charming 24-year-old American doctoral student with a sculptural body who is hosted for a period of study by Elio’s father, a polyglot professor of Jewish origin. Elio and Oliver will live an intense and fleeting love story.
Call Me by Your Name is an international film, both in terms of production and the origin of the actors. Elio is played by the bilingual actor Timothée Chalamet, born and raised in New York by a French father and an American mother, while Oliver is played by the American actor Armie Hammer. Elio’s parents are played respectively by the American actor Michael Stuhlbarg and actress Amira Casar, born and raised in England and Ireland and later France. French and Italian actors are also part of the cast, playing minor roles (Elio’s French friends, Marzia and Chiara, and the Italian housekeepers of the villa, Mafalda and Anchise). Despite the fact that the film is entirely set in Italy, the dialogues between the characters take place in different languages, in an alternation of codes which creates a multilingual mixture – made up of English, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, and the Lombard dialect spoken in Crema – and which gives the story a unique atmosphere. While some characters are monolingual, others are bilingual or multilingual, speaking multiple languages fluently. The film’s linguistic diversity, exhibited in a rich and articulate polyglossia, manages to produce comprehensibility and incomprehension at the same time, contributing to a sense of estrangement.
[…]
The functions of multilingualism in Call Me by Your Name
In the original version of the film, English is the main language (L1), while French, Italian, and the Lombard dialect, for which English subtitles are provided, constitute the L3. German and Hebrew are also included in the L3 category, but they appear sporadically in the film and without subtitles. For the dialogue in French and Italian, the film makes use of “partial subtitling” (Bleichenbacher 2008, Kozloff 2000, O’Sullivan 2011), a well-established translation practice in multilingual productions.
[…]
Since the film is set exclusively in Italy, the presence of multilingualism is justified by the identity of the characters themselves and their different backgrounds. The predominant presence of English is due not only to the polyglot nature of Elio’s family, but especially to the presence of Oliver, the American guest who expresses himself and communicates almost exclusively in his mother tongue. On the other hand, Elio, the actual protagonist of the film, a lover of literature and classical music, speaks perfect English and French, as well as Italian, as do his parents. The Perlman family does not possess an easily definable and univocal linguistic and cultural identity, since, as Elio himself observes: “We are Jewish but also American, Italian, French. Somewhat atypical”.1
From a functional point of view, the presence of multilingualism in Call Me by Your Name plays several roles. Italian and the Lombard dialect spoken in Crema play first of all a post-carding function, placing the story in an undefined location in the countryside around Crema. In addition to the dialogues in Italian, radio, music, television and newspapers also contribute to depicting an image of Italy in the early 1980s that serves as the background to the story. In Guadagnino’s film, Italy becomes the scene of a continuous alternation between different languages, creating the effect of estrangement mentioned above.
Since the film tells the story of a multilingual and multicultural family, the realistic rendering of multilingualism in this context is evident: as it usually happens in bilingual or multilingual families, the languages alternate according to the speakers and the communicative situations. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in the family context, the communication between Elio and his father almost always takes place in L1, sometimes excluding from the conversation those who do not speak English (for example, the housekeepers, relatives and friends who speak only Italian). The use of L1 therefore seems to characterize the father-son relationship, as is evident in one of the final scenes of the film, in which Elio’s father gives him all his support in a delicate moment such as his first heartbreak.
If L1 is the main vehicle of communication with his father, L3 (French) characterizes the link between Elio and his mother. Elio’s mother, in her interactions with her son, uses mainly French, especially in the scenes that show them sharing intense moments, such as when she tries to investigate her son’s feelings for Oliver, or in the scene in which, after Oliver’s departure, Elio, in desperation, speaks on the phone to his mother asking her in French to pick him up from the station (“Tu peux venir me chercher, maman?”).
Multilingualism in Call Me by Your Name, however, also becomes an important means of characterization. The presence of English, French, and Italian mainly serves the function of characterization not only of an overall family situation, of a multicultural atmosphere full of complicity, but also of the individual characters: it connotes Elio as an adolescent in search of his own identity, in an exploration shaped by his relationships with others. As Oliver says, quoting The Cosmic Fragments by Heraclitus, “The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing”. Guadagnino himself says: “I like the idea that the other changes you – and that there is no boundary” (Hutchinson 2017).
