Without a doubt, “Call Me By Your Name” stands out as one of the most beautifully filmed movies of the last year. While actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet get a lot of the credit for creating a really memorable film, and deservedly so, it’s really the Italian countryside that often steals the movie, in many scenes. Freeze frame many of the scenes, and they turn into beautiful photographs, with qualities that remind you of amazing paintings. But what if these scenes were literally paintings?
Thanks to the genius young Filipino creator Mika Labrague, some of the most memorable scenes from the film have been morphed into incredible paintings. And not just any paintings, but works from famous French artist Claude Monet. In her Instagram account Call Me By Your Monet, naturally, Labrague mashes the film and the paintings perfectly, creating something unique, and dares you to think of the film in a whole new light. Labrague goes so far as to include lines from the film as captions.
While many will inevitably write this project off as a person just toying around with Photoshop, there is some true creative energy at play here. Looking at something so simple, yet brilliant, just makes you wonder how a million other people haven’t thought of it already. And if you say you did, you’re lying. You would have already created it.
In an interview with WIRED Italy, Labrague says the Instagram project was born out of intuition, and how “the spirit of the story” fit perfectly with the paintings by Monet.
Makes you wonder if there’s not some intrepid animators out there that can take this a step further and create full scenes with the paintings as background. If you’re out there, get to it! Or perhaps, maybe there’s a whole series of Oscar-nominated films that can be mashed up with famous paintings?