Dog Days
On some seasonal beliefs
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
In some Indiranagar restaurant, under the pretext of trying a new cuisine, my friend and I conspire about his new human of attention. We dissect their Twitter, giggle over their pictures, and flinch when we realise LinkedIn would notify them of stalkers like us. We are both equally amateurs at this sport, awkward and tactless but I offer my counsel as if I have had a hundred conquests. My friend goes over and over about the situation, analysing it in his and their viewpoints, and spitting out summaries of his reasoning. We are so giddy, we talk of the magic of what I like to call quite clinically as pre-pain love. Love before its been touched by the hyper-tangibility of the other.
It is summer. We have all run out of words to describe it. We face it like newspaper reportage. There is the scorching and sizzling heat. The thundershowers bring relief but creates water-logging issues. We resort to tender coconut to beat the heat. Beyond all the cliches of this very cliched season, there is still newness. I notice on my nightly university walks that there are some new persons in usual spots occupied before by their predecessors-in-love. New couples and semi-couples crop up every summer. Here too, I sense the magic of that pre-pain love.
I watched Call Me By Your Name last night for the second time after a couple of years. It is a great summer movie and a great summer-love movie. I am struck now by how Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, the first of many cool-boy roles. He has a certain kind of bodily looseness that turns to liquid as his nonchalance turns to fear that accompanies any serious joy. He commits to a kind of slow dance around Oliver, played by the now-disgraced Armie Hammer at the peak of his very American handsomeness — a dance whose pace is matched only by the utter slowness of the Italian countryside. They do all of those cliched summer things that the fortunate people in Europe are supposed to do: swim, eat fruit, read in the sun, spend cool nights with friends and lovers, and love each other.
Call Me By Your Name ultimately is a great summer love movie because it captures that pre-pain love. It is not without its conflict and sufferings, but like my friend expectantly checking his notifications for a DM, the torment is the joy, it is the love. There are shots of Elio looking, observing Oliver, his inscrutable face slowly breaking as the audience realise what works behind the cool-boy facade. I have come to believe that this kind of unhurried exploration of the act of falling for the other, of the stage of pre-pain love is only possible or at least arrives at its most refined in queer cinema. The last great straight people movie to touch on this was Before Sunset. Heterosexual love in cinema relies too much on conflict and resolution, they do not let the characters just be. Sufjan Stevens’ Mystery of Love appears only in the last 20-or-so minutes of the movie, but it really signifies the unconditional love that is capped at six-weeks:
And what difference does it make
When this love is over?
I remember the movie creating quite a storm when it was released in 2017. I would not watch it for several years after but the news of its significance was carried over by The Hindu reporting it in a very dignified manner. It was the first time I heard of Chalamet and I think I’ve liked him and his mop of hair ever since. My then close friend explained the title to me. He calls him by his own name, and the other guy calls him by his own name. We both agreed this was stupid. We were two ninth-graders in an all-girls convent school. We didn’t know any teenage boys, let alone grasp the concept of two boys in love. This conversation was almost a decade ago. But it is summer and I will inevitably remember her on her birthday a couple of weeks from now. I will not wish her. A different kind of pre-pain love, now remembered entirely through the immense heartache and anger that its waning caused.
It is summer and all the dead corpses come back after you thought you killed them. The janitors sweep away the kopak tree flowers on the campusgrounds in vain.
Not all my friends are finding the same belief.
Another friend rejects the summer’s promise of love. Kategi yaar. I empathise. But the rejection of the possibilities of even what I call pre-pain love upsets me for some reason. I try to say something about the cynicism of our times, about how feeling, any kind of feeling is good and is what imbues us with humanity, and that these apps are profit-making whose algorithm cannot capture that humanity. But I leave it. He still says he would like to get his heartbroken. I nod along.
There were early monsoon showers last night. Mangoes ripen somewhere. Summer rains. Always violent. Always welcome.
Magical writing! No sentence is needless. Every word is integral.