“In the Key of Loss”

Abstract

This article addresses a particular example of the intersection of literature and cinema in the film Call Me By Your Name, made by Luca Guadagnino and based on the novel of the same title by André Aciman, and the themes of nostalgia and loss in the work of both. The film results from the encounter, in its production and in a large number of retrospective discussions, between the cosmopolitan writer André Aciman and the Italian director Luca Guadagnino who, while attentive to global issues such as the trans-Mediterranean migration which features in the film, is very much grounded in his home region of northern Italy. The (rather differently figured) Jewish and homosexual identities of the two protagonists in the novel and the film are also addressed.