Call Me by Your Name recap

Seventeen-year-old Elio spends a summer at his family's Italian villa with Oliver, the American scholar invited there by Elio's father. Elio's fascination becomes an intense but guarded desire, complicated by jealousy, shame, and his relationship with local girl Marzia. After indirect tests and misunderstandings, Elio admits what he feels. He and Oliver begin a brief secret affair, sharing both tenderness and emotional uncertainty because Oliver must soon leave. A final trip to Rome lets them live more openly before the separation. Elio's father responds to his grief with unusual compassion, affirming the value of what the two men experienced. Across the following two decades, Oliver marries and raises a family while Elio pursues his own adult life. They meet occasionally and discover that neither has forgotten. When Oliver later returns to the changed villa, the men recognize that their alternative life together has passed, but the summer remains an enduring part of them both.

Seventeen-year-old Elio is spending another summer at his parents' villa on the Italian coast when Oliver arrives from the United States. Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old scholar, will stay for six weeks while revising a manuscript and assisting Elio's professor father. Elio gives up his bedroom to the visitor and becomes preoccupied with him almost at once. Oliver's confidence, abrupt departures, friendships, swimming, and easy popularity alternately draw Elio in and make him resentful. He watches Oliver's attention to Chiara and tries to conceal his jealousy. At the same time Elio grows closer to Marzia, a local girl who likes him and offers a less frightening route into sexual experience. Elio and Oliver discover shared Jewish backgrounds and circle around moments of intimacy, but neither speaks plainly. Elio interprets every gesture while fearing that an open advance would destroy the companionship he wants.

Elio's hints finally become direct enough for Oliver to understand. During a bicycle ride they stop near a place associated with Monet, where Elio admits that his apparent indifference hides strong feelings. Oliver does not reject him, but warns that acting on the attraction could have consequences. Their restraint gives way after further uncertainty: they arrange a nighttime meeting and begin a secret affair. The intimacy Elio has long imagined brings happiness, fear, embarrassment, and an immediate awareness that Oliver's departure is approaching. Elio continues seeing Marzia even though he cannot offer her his full attention. His attachment to Oliver becomes more consuming, including a private sexual episode involving a peach that exposes how vulnerable and ashamed he feels; Oliver responds with tenderness. Their closeness deepens, but the limited summer timetable prevents either man from treating it as the beginning of an ordinary shared life.

Before Oliver returns to America, Elio joins him on a short trip to Rome connected with a writer's publication celebration. Away from the villa and its need for secrecy, they move through the city together, attend the lively gathering, drink, talk with the writer's friends, and spend a final night as a couple. The freedom of the trip intensifies the coming loss rather than resolving it. On the journey back, Elio is already grieving. Oliver leaves Italy as planned, and Elio returns to his family without him. Elio's father recognizes the relationship and speaks to his son privately. Instead of condemning him or pretending nothing happened, he tells Elio not to deaden the feelings simply to escape pain, and he reveals that he envies the depth of the connection. His response gives Elio room to understand the summer as something valuable even though it has ended.

The final part follows Elio and Oliver through later encounters. Oliver returns to the United States, marries, becomes a father, and continues his academic career. Elio also grows older and builds a life divided among places and relationships, yet both men retain the summer with exceptional clarity. Elio eventually visits Oliver in America and sees the family life that might have excluded the path they once imagined. Oliver makes clear that he has not forgotten. Time alters the Italian villa as well: Elio's father dies, his mother declines, and people who belonged to that summer disappear. About twenty years after the affair, Oliver comes back to visit. Their conversation acknowledges both the persistence of their bond and the choices that have made a renewed life together impossible. Elio's closing wish is that Oliver speak to him using their old exchange of identities, a sign that the names and memories they shared still join them despite the long separation.

Years after their summer, Elio and Oliver continue to measure later relationships and choices against what they shared. Oliver returns to the United States, marries, has children, and becomes an academic; Elio builds an adult life in Europe and America but does not find the past replaceable. Their meetings become infrequent. Elio visits Oliver and sees the domestic world Oliver chose, while Oliver acknowledges that he has retained an exact memory of their time together. Elio's father eventually dies, his mother declines, and the old summer household changes. Roughly twenty years after the affair, Oliver visits the Italian villa again. Both men understand that the other life they once imagined is no longer recoverable, yet the intimacy remains part of their identities. Elio closes by wishing Oliver would address him through their old exchange of names, confirming that the remembered bond still exists even though their shared summer cannot resume.