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It would be a tad banal to complement Call Me Chihiro for stirring “emotion” in its viewers, as you could argue that nearly every commercial film aims to do this in one way or another. Personally, I don’t really like when I can sense anything trying to manipulate my emotions. It’s particularly unbearable when the narrative becomes a telenovela of romanticism and sentimentality. But in some cases, the emotions are more complex, or perhaps even so basic that they speak to us on a visceral, indefinable level. For me, Rikiya Imaizumi’s Call Me Chihiro (2023) provides this kind of indescribable experience, affecting the viewer with the beauty of platonic attraction, delicious food, basic human kindness, and happy detachment.
Call Me Chihiro certainly has a plot, but it is in no hurry to cross the finish line. The film tells the story of a former sex worker who takes a job at a bento shop in a small, seaside town. Though traditionally attractive, the film does not try to objectify her. Even as local men come just to say hello and tell Chihiro that she is beautiful, she dismisses them with playful indifference.
Throughout the story, we come to learn more about Chihiro’s past, though we see very little of her time as a sex worker. In fact, the only scene depicting her former profession shows Chihiro stroking the hair of a man who is convinced that he is an alien from another planet. Chihiro comes to adopt the same philosophy, and hopes that she can find others who hail from the same planet as her.
Much of the narrative focuses on Chihiro’s odd relationships with various locals. She bathes and gives food to a homeless man, though he quickly disappears from her life. Chihiro also becomes a friend and maternal figure to a teenage girl who struggles to make friends at home or at school, a young boy whose mother works too much to spend time with him, and a blind woman recovering in the hospital.
There are conflicts, large and small, at various points, but the director seems uninterested in lingering on the uglier aspects of the human experience. Instead, he allows us to see the ugliness briefly, and then, with a smile and a shrug, whisks us away to something more endearing. Call Me Chihiro is what many would call a “slice-of-life” film or even a “feel-good movie,” but for me, it is much too good for those monikers.