The “I just got home from watching a movie I’ve been waiting most of a year to see” review.

There are two short and brutal conclusions I have come to in the time it took to walk home: I don’t think it could possibly have lived up to all my fantasies; and it was absolutely worth watching.

I heard about Call Me By Your Name back in January or something, when it first premiered at the film festivals and showed up in my newsfeed. I don’t know whether I heard of the main actor, Timothée Chalamet, or the movie first, but either way I found and watched some of his other movies and decided that he was worth following. And throughout the year I kept seeing the occasional news article as more festivals and interviews came and went. I didn’t go and read the book, due to my current general policy of seeing the movie first (you can’t be disappointed in the movie for being different from the book if you haven’t read the book yet), so everything I knew came from the interviews, trailer, and other articles. I knew it was a love story set in Italy in the early ’80s between a seventeen-year-old boy and the graduate student intern his father hires one summer. And that there was a peach involved at some point.

Finally telling other people about the movie felt strange, because I hadn’t really subjected anyone to my LGBT media interests in person before, but everyone nodded and smiled politely when I mentioned it.

Buying the ticket felt strange, because I did it in person. It felt a bit like what I imagine making eye contact with the cashier feels like when buying condoms. “I’m about to watch a movie with plenty of kissing and the occasional butt.” Yeah…

Walking into the theater felt strange, but at least here I was able to find some comfort in the knowledge that everyone else in the room was in the exact same situation.

And watching the movie felt strange, because I was surrounded by a bunch of other people when the butts appeared on the big screen.

But there was also laughter, music, beautiful imagery, and tears. At several points it felt less like I was watching a movie and more like I was just seeing two people talk. I enjoyed my time at the theater, and I want to see it again.

But I wasn’t blown away. It wasn’t like Doctor Strange or Star Wars, where you come away thinking “that was a marvelous spectacle to behold.” And I didn’t cry like in Inside Out or Coco. It was a film meant to be experienced, but it doesn’t beat you over the head or stab you in the heart. It’s slower, smoother, and a little deeper than all the other movies I’m trying to compare it to.

I decided my biggest problem is that it wasn’t long enough. I wasn’t able to fall in love with the main characters in time. And maybe that was because I had built up this intangible mass of memories and emotions connected to the movie, but with no basis in reality, and I couldn’t replace it all with the characters in front of me before it was all over.

In all the other LGBT movies, TV shows, and books that I’ve loved, I’ve never had such a long period of build-up before being able to experience the real thing. I had no false expectations to correct.

Which is an impressive recommendation for reading the book, which is exactly what I plan on starting tonight.