Intimate Visibilities and Queer Temporalities: A Comparative Cultural and Queer Theoretical Analysis of Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name

This article provides a comparative analysis of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) through the intersecting lenses of Modern Film Appreciation Theory, Cultural Theory, and Queer Theory. It examines how both films render same-sex desire, intimacy, and emotional becoming within distinct socio-cultural and cinematic contexts. By interrogating narrative structures, visual aesthetics, performance, and spatial configurations, the essay highlights how these films negotiate visibility, embodiment, and temporality in ways that both challenge and reproduce heteronormative ideologies. Drawing on critical frameworks from Sedgwick, Ahmed, Deleuze, Mulvey, and others, this study argues that both films articulate complex and ambivalent modes of queer subjectivity. Ultimately, these cinematic texts illuminate the potential and the limits of contemporary queer representation in global art cinema.