Elio's father, a professor of archaeology, invites a 24-year-old Jewish-American graduate student, Oliver, to live with the family over the summer and help with his academic paperwork.

[18] He sees it not as a "gay" movie but as one about "the beauty of the newborn idea of desire, unbiased and uncynical", reflecting his motto of living "with a sense of joie de vivre".

[20] He also wanted the story to follow two people "in the moment", rather than focus on an antagonist or a tragedy[15]—an approach inspired by Maurice Pialat's À nos amours (1983).

Two of the film's producers, Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman, saw a galley proof of André Aciman's debut novel Call Me by Your Name in 2007 and "optioned" the screen rights before its publication.

[31][37] Guadagnino, who has called the novel "a Proustian book about remembering the past and indulging in the melancholy of lost things",[21] collaborated on the adaptation with Ivory and Walter Fasano.

The filmmakers set the movie entirely in 1983 to help the audience understand the characters, believing this approach would allow them to remain true to the book's spirit.

In his words, Guadagnino chose "the year—in Italy at least—where the '70s are killed, when everything that was great about the '70s is definitely shut down", but also a time when the characters could be "in a way untouched by the corruption of the '80s—in the U.S., Reagan, and in the UK, Thatcher".

[57] Aciman was surprised by Guadagnino's final scene, in which Elio weeps by the fireplace;[46] he wrote of the film adaptation: Cinema can be an entirely magical medium.

"[53] By contrast, Ivory cited scenes from his film Maurice (1987)—a gay romantic drama that includes male nudity—as "a more natural way of doing things than to hide them, or to do what Luca did, which is to pan the camera out of the window toward some trees.

[40] Upon his arrival in Italy, Chalamet—who spoke French fluently and had played piano and guitar for years[32][40][63]—prepared for his role with a schedule of daily Italian lessons, gym workouts three times a week,[32] and work with composer Roberto Solci.

[20] The crew, including production designer Samuel Deshors and set decorators Sandro Piccarozzi and Violante Visconti di Modrone, styled the house with furniture and objects inspired by the characters.

[32][75] The filmmakers set up faded political billboards in public places to reflect the Italian general election in 1983[68] and re-created a newsstand full of magazines of that time.

[22][79] While filming the confrontation scene between Oliver and Elio, Mukdeeprom wept in a corner of the room after they finished the first take, overwhelmed by a feeling of profound empathy for the actors.

[21][111] Impressed by the lyricism of American songwriter Sufjan Stevens,[22] Guadagnino asked him to record an original song for Call Me by Your Name and to narrate the film from the perspective of Elio at an older age.

[116] It features songs by Stevens, The Psychedelic Furs, Franco Battiato, Loredana Bertè, Bandolero, Giorgio Moroder, Joe Esposito, and F. R. David, as well as music by John Adams, Erik Satie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bach, and Ravel.

[125] At the Beijing International Film Festival, it was originally scheduled for April 2018, but was removed from the official program with no explanation; Patrick Brzeski of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the decision reflected the government's "consistent stance of intolerance toward gay content".

The website's critical consensus reads, "Call Me by Your Name offers a melancholy, powerfully affecting portrait of first love, empathetically acted by Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer.

[204] Peter Debruge of Variety wrote that the film "advances the canon of gay cinema" by portraying "a story of first love ... that transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple".

[203] Sam Adams of the BBC wrote that Stuhlbarg's performance "puts a frame around the movie's painting and opens up avenues we may not have thought to explore", and called it "one of his finest" to date.

[207] Richard Lawson wrote that Guadagnino's adaptation "was made with real love, with good intentions, with a clarity of heart and purposeful, unpretentious intellect" and hailed it as a "modern gay classic" in his Vanity Fair review.

[208] Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips was pleased by Guadagnino's "wonderfully paradoxical" visual interests and wrote that Stevens's songs "work like magic on your sympathies regarding Elio's emotional awakening."

"[209] The Economist noted the tension "between pain and pleasure" in the film and praised Chalamet, saying that he "evokes so many shades of humanity, portraying a path of youthful self-discovery that is more raw, unhinged, and ultimately honest than many actors could manage".

[210] Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail, who gave the film two and a half stars, also enjoyed Chalamet's effort in capturing "first love and its inevitable heartbreak" and said the "multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity ... but it can try the patience".

"[213] Armond White of Out called the movie "craven commercialism" and a "super-bourgeois fantasy" that "exploit[s] the queer audience's romantic needs by packaging them and falsifying them.

[219]A feature in The Advocate, an LGBT-interest magazine, drew attention to other narrative films depicting heterosexual relationships with similar or greater age gaps, such as between the teenaged Scarlett and the 33-year-old Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

[243] By early 2018, the film had attracted a following in China among heterosexual women, who saw it as a Western "boys' love" romance, evidenced by its popularity on the Chinese social network and media database Douban.

[47] In October 2017, he said he hoped to make a sequel in 2020 that might be in the style of François Truffaut's The Adventures of Antoine Doinel series, telling the story of Oliver and Elio as they age.

"[248] Guadagnino has expressed interest in the politics of the 1990s, saying, "It is the time of the fall of Communism and the start of the new world order and so-called 'end of history' that Francis Fukuyama established then ... the beginning of the Berlusconi era in Italy and it would mean dealing with the [first Gulf War] of Iraq.

"[43] In January 2018, Guadagnino said the sequel would be set "right after the fall of Berlin Wall and that great shift that was the end of ... the USSR"[19] and that its first scene could depict Elio watching Paul Vecchiali's Once More (1988)—the first French film to deal with AIDS—in a theater.

[260][262] At the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in October, Hammer said that Guadagnino had laid out a potential plot for the sequel and that it might be a few years away: "he wants to wait so that we age a bit more so that gap makes sense, kind of like a Linklater thing.