‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory

The imprint of the veteran gay independent director James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name is fundamental: not merely as the 2017 film’s Academy Award-winning credited screenwriter, but via Ivory’s intimate involvement from 2007 onwards when the rights to André Aciman’s novel were first optioned. This chapter explores the contours of Ivory’s influence on Call Me by Your Name in cinematic–authorial and production–strategic terms to situate Call Me by Your Name’s remarkable 21st-century impact as LGBTQ+ cinema and same-sex romance in relation to Ivory’s longer and wider film oeuvre and to Merchant Ivory Productions’ collaborative, representational and promotional practices in their 44 years as a (widely and wilfully unacknowledged) queer filmmaking partnership. The chapter, firstly, offers a new, nuanced reading of Call Me by Your Name’s affinities with Ivory’s long-underrated affirmative gay film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s posthumous 1971 novel – questioning viral social-media assertions about the ‘parallels’ between the two films which proliferated amid the rising 2017–2018 hype around the film – and, secondly, establishes Call Me by Your Name’s place and cinematic precursors within Ivory’s wider, less-known body of work beyond the ‘heritage film’ mode between 1963 and 2009, focusing particularly on Ivory’s films Slaves of New York (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Thirdly, drawing on archive and wider primary sources, the chapter establishes the senses in which Call Me by Your Name’s exceptional crossover success owed a debt to the innovative promotional and release strategies which had been rehearsed three decades earlier in the release of Merchant Ivory’s Maurice.