Water is a powerful cinematic motif in Call Me by Your Name, a thematic, metaphoric and audio-visual force of nature that binds Elio and Oliver together, and water features prominently in a majority of their scenes together. In a scene early on in the film, Elio picks up a book belonging to Oliver - The Cosmic Fragments - on the works of Greek philosopher Heraclitus. We hear Oliver’s voice reading a quote from it echoing in Elio’s mind.
”The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing.“
This quote is a good starting point to begin to look at how the filmmakers use nature, especially water, as a storytelling tool throughout the film to say a lot of interesting things about Elio and his growing relationship with Oliver. The quote compares Elio and Oliver’s love to a flowing river, read by Oliver in Elio’s mind. Like the river in the quote, their relationship can only stay the same by changing, by letting fresh springs from the mountains into their pond - and it strongly hints at a reunion between the two of them, sometime in the future.
