Fans of Timothée Chalamet have a double dose of good news as Warner Bros. UK recently released a teaser trailer for Bones & 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 with Call Me By Your Name. On top of this, Guadagnino expressed his desire to make a Call Me By Your Name sequel with 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 with IndieWire at the Telluride Film Festival, promoting Bones & 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”?
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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 a Call Me sequel. 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 the Call Me By Your Name novelist 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, but not necessarily literary critics.
James Ivory Is Unlikely to Return to Adapt the Screenplay
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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 novel Find Me than to commission a screenwriter to write an original screenplay. In order to preserve the Merchant-Ivory magic in the Call Me By Your Name film adaptation, there will have to be cuts from Aciman’s sequel novel Find Me similar to those which Ivory made from Aciman’s original novel Call Me.
In Find Me, Aciman brings readers back into the lives of the main characters from Call Me By Your Name with four episodic love affairs split into chapters of varying length. In the first and longest chapter Samuel Perlman (the father character played brilliantly by Michael Stulhbarg in Call 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 in Call 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 book Call Me By Your Name, including a similar ending from the first book. In an interview at TIFF in 2018, James Ivory said:
So if three out of the four chapters from the novel Find Me are 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?
In the second chapter of Find 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:
That little dialogue scene alone could begin the trailer for a film adaptation of Find 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
Expanding Find 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 selling Find Me with 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.
