Almost Heaven: Call Me by Your Name as a Queer Earthly Paradise

Abstract

Abstract:Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) centers around the summer romance between the precocious seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman and a visiting grad student, Oliver. This article argues that the idyllic Northern Italian setting presented in the film is not meant to be realistic but a Foucauldian heterotopia that could be considered a locus amoenus [pleasant spot]. Further, this space can be seen as a queering of Dante’s Earthly Paradise. Guadagnino’s queer paradise challenges Dante’s presentation of homosexuality as a lack of production in Inferno. Instead, this space becomes a place of natural and artistic creation. Connecting Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia and the locus amoenus to Call Me by Your Name provides opportunities for a better understanding of safe spaces for queer and creative explorations.