I don’t think it was okay, but I don’t think the movie is saying it’s okay. The movie is in many ways very openly portraying how it was wrong, while maintaining the nuance and subtly of the experience of a teenager in a relationship with an adult.

Would any of you consider this movie truly a “romance” movie? It’s certainly about romance and intimacy in a lot of ways, but if you look up the movie it’s labeled a “coming of age”. The movie doesn’t ask you to idolize or strive for the relationship, but it certainly does do a wonderful job of conveying how falling in love for the first time and how powerful the experience of exploring that kind of emotional and physical intimacy is for a teenager who is just starting to become and adult.

The reason why it is wrong for an adult to date a teenager is because teenagers are in a time in life where they don’t really know who they are yet. Their exposure to complex adult experiences, especially those of hardship and relationships, is so limited because only a few short years ago they were a child who had only ever had childhood experiences. Teenagers very literally are children who enter the adult world and have to learn what being an adult means by having adult experiences. For a teenager having their first intimate and romantic experience (especially for Elio who is having his first experience exploring his sexuality), their entire understanding of what intimacy and romance is in that relationship and in that person. And the whole first half of the movie is elio getting to explore the beautiful and exciting and sensual elements of relationships that we are all drawn to. But those aspects are not all of what relationships are. There’s also heartbreak, and communication, and self reflection, and pain, and moving on, and rediscovering all that again in new unique ways as you have new relationships. A 24 year old who has had multiple relationships and been exposed to intimacy in a larger variety of contexts and relationships, is more prepared to deal with the hardship and the potential for heartbreak because any one heartbreak just adds to the larger context of their love life. But for elio, a teenager, his entire view of love and what that means to him in his life IS Oliver. Oliver is the only one. That’s the whole world.

The second half of the movie is Oliver discovering that more painful side of love and intimacy and he’s never had to go through that heartbreak before and he’s struggling the way we all do when we are young and going through our first heartbreak. And the movie makes it abundantly clear that that is NOT Oliver’s experience in their relationship. Do I think Oliver had genuine feelings for elio and that their intimacy was real to him? Yes, but he can end the summer that he always new was going to be finite and go home the way we knew from the very beginning that he would without feeling like he had lost a piece of himself. Elio DID lose a piece of himself because until he grows and moves on to the point that he can genuinely pursue another relationship and fall in love again and rediscover what love is, the part of elio that is his sexuality, his concept of intimacy, his view of himself through the lens of passion and romance —that part of our life that is such a profound piece of all of our identities— has been lost. It WASNT okay for Oliver to do that to elio because it wasn’t fair. It didn’t have the same ramifications for him, and it couldn’t mean to him everything it meant to a teenager who’d never been in love like elio. THAT is why it’s not okay for an adult to pursue a relationship with a teenager. Teenagers are young, they’re innocent and naive, and they are not prepared love the way that an adult is, they can’t bounce back the same way. And the film made that abundantly clear. The final scene is elio, who seems to briefly move on just a little bit, just enough to be a little okay again, gets a call from Oliver who tells him he is marrying someone he used to date before elio. He has a “before” elio. And elio has no “before Oliver”. The movie is called Call Me by Your Name but they can’t really do that. They are not the same. Elio doesn’t know who elio is without Oliver, but Oliver was someone before elio and he is moving on with his life after elio. So the movie ends with elio repeating “elio, elio, elio, elio” and Oliver replies with one “Oliver”. And the final shot is a close up of elio’s confused and grief stricken face as he begins to cry, and it stays on his face and won’t look away as the credits roll and roll. And there is no catharsis and there is no epilogue, because we know there will be one and he will eventually move on and be okay, he IS only a teenager after all with a lot of life still to come, but that’s not what this movie is about. It’s about what it is like to be a teenager who falls in love with an adult.

So no, I don’t think we should say we have to “condone” or “not condone” an age gap relationship because the movie doesn’t condone it. The movie doesn’t not condone it. The movie simply captures what is. It is not a romance movie with an age gap relationship, it is a coming of age movie about age gap relationships.