Summary
Some people will enjoy this title; there’s a simple yet beautiful elegance to how the story (or lack of it) is presented.
Call Me Chihiro is a Japanese drama directed by Rikiya Imaizumi. The story is based on the manga Chihiro-san by Hiroyuki Yasuda, which ran between 2017 and 2018. This slice-of-life drama follows a former sex worker building a new life for herself as a bento shop worker and forging connections with the people she meets.
Call Me Chihiro Review and Plot Summary
The film’s first scene introduces Chihiro (Kasumi Arimura) on her hands and knees, chatting with a cat. We then watch her engage in flirty banter with a customer at the bento shop she works at. Chihiro used to be a sex worker and, in the present, seems to have gathered quite a few male fans who patronize the food stall to see her. Throughout the runtime, we see Chihiro meet and interact with various people in the small seaside community she inhabits while also getting brief snippets of her past.
Among the people Chihiro meets is an old homeless man she starts giving lunch to (Keiichi Suzuki), a high school student named Kuniko (Hana Toyoshima) whose authoritarian father rules the family with an iron fist, a young boy raised by a single mother who works nights and rarely has time to care for him, and Tae (Jun Fubuki) – the blind co-owner of the bento shop.
She also reconnects with her trans friend from the massage parlor, Basil, and her former employer, Utsumi (Lily Franky), who has since quit the sex work business and now runs a fish store.
Call Me Chihiro is a very slow slice-of-life film. It’s also a very long film, and, dare I say, it’s quite the snooze fest. We spend over 2 hours in Chihiro’s company and learn almost nothing about her.
A plethora of long static shots show the protagonist staring at the ocean and walking, and there’s even a drawn-out scene of her inexplicably burying a dead body. She shows little to no emotion to anything around her, and that’s played out by the other characters as a quirky personality trait, but it comes across as robotic.
Her past was as much of a mystery to me at the movie’s end as it was when I first hit the play button, despite several flashbacks trying to fill in the gaps.
Some of the other characters around Chihiro, especially the two kids, are more compelling, and this would have been a better film if it focused more on their story. We also get several touching moments of seeing community members forging friendships because they all know the protagonist.
But these scenes are few and far between in a very long and convoluted movie about nothing.
Is Call Me Chihiro a Good Movie?
This film doesn’t tell, and it doesn’t show. It just is. And sometimes life is like that. We just are. Some people will enjoy this title, there’s a simple yet beautiful elegance to how the story (or lack of it) is presented. But if you want a film with a narrative to follow, you might want to skip this one.
Call Me Chihiro Ending Explained
Setting the scene
Among the people Chihiro meets is an old homeless man she starts giving lunch to (Keiichi Suzuki), a high school student named Kuniko (Hana Toyoshima) whose authoritarian father rules the family with an iron fist, a young boy raised by a single mother who works nights and rarely has time to care for him, and Tae (Jun Fubuki) – the blind co-owner of the bento shop. She also reconnects with her trans friend from the massage parlor, Basil, and her former employer, Utsumi (Lily Franky), who has since quit the sex work business and now runs a fish store.
By the end of the movie, most of the people around Chihiro also found each other and became friends. Kuniko and Makoto share dinner with the boy’s mother, who seems to have come around and is willing to spend more time with her son, while Utsumi and Basil start dating.
Call Me Chihiro (Credit – Netflix)
What’s Chihiro’s real name?
When Tae goes missing from the hospital, her husband is initially concerned. But then we find out that Chihiro used her real name, Aya, to visit the blind woman in the hospital. The two just went for a drive and had a meaningful conversation followed by a heartfelt hug.
Chihiro was the name of a woman she had met and bonded with as a little girl, and she chose it as an alias for her sex worker persona. During the conversation with Tae, our protagonist acknowledges her mother’s death and admits to feeling nothing about her passing.
Meanwhile, Chihiro’s former employer tells Basil about the day he first meets our protagonist. She came to him looking for work at the massage parlor with old, ill-fitting shoes, which made him feel sorry for her.
What did you think of Call Me Chihiro? Comment below.
