: The message is that the pain of loss is the price of having felt something beautiful—to kill the pain is to kill the joy that preceded it.

The story takes place in the summer of 1983 in Bergamo, Italy. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old Jewish-American teenager, spends his summer vacation at his family's villa in the countryside. Elio's father, Dr. Oliver Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), is a renowned archaeologist who invites a graduate student, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to stay with them for the summer to work on his thesis.