Luca Guadagnino has cited Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema — a 1968 Italian film in which a mysterious stranger arrives and seduces every member of a bourgeois family — as the direct narrative model for what happens between Elio and Oliver that summer. Wong Kar-wai's influence is everywhere in the texture: desire as something felt in light and fabric before it's understood as feeling. Teorema is on MUBI and will change how you read the film.
The Films That Shaped It