It’s been weeks and, still, I’ve yet to excise Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous Call Me by Your Name from my mind. I’d locked in a Melbourne International Film Festival session soon after 2017 bookings opened; with some pre-googling, I’d begun looking forward to salacious scenes in Italian summer, some shirtlessness, and maybe a sneaky pash or three. The usual queer-cinema fare, basically: the film was my ticket to two hours of tantalising fantasy. But Call Me by Your Name took me for a spin, wrung me out, wreaked havoc on my sensibilities both as a critic and as a person who identifies as queer.

This isn’t a traditional piece of criticism; there are countless others who have already tackled Guadagnino’s film, unpacking its utopic portrayals, deconstruction of desire, and attention to period and personal detail. Nor is this a discussion of adaptation—I haven’t read André Aciman’s 2007 novel, though I’ve heard it boasts a more developed, possibly more gutting ending. This is a piece about a prolonged moment in which cinema and spectator have become entwined in an impasse of affect. I’m responding to the film not as text but as testimony; I’m writing on it as someone whose experiences match those exposed on screen.