The Names Have to Arrive Last
A Case Study of Call Me (Appelle-moi) (2021)
“They meet as roles, confess as strangers, and exchange names only after the people hidden underneath have already been revealed.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work.
This article discusses the film’s plot in detail, including its ending. It also references sex work, childhood abandonment, parental rejection, and family separation.
A Note on Sourcing: Call Me is a festival-submitted short, and the wider ecosystem of trade press this series usually draws on is largely absent here as well. In this case, writer-director Didier Noun answered a set of interview questions directly for this publication during the film’s original Atlantis Awards run, and his stated intentions below are drawn from that exchange, translated and lightly revised from his original French for clarity. Everything else is direct analysis of the finished film, corroborated against its credited crew.
Editorial Context: Call Me won Best Live Action Short Film at Season 1 of The Atlantis Awards, and Kévin J. Ziane won Best Actor. This is included as context for the festival’s continued engagement with the film, not as evidence for the argument below.
Thierry and Lina tell each other almost everything before they tell each other their names.
She knows that he grew up without parents, moved between foster homes, and spent years searching for the mother who abandoned him. She knows that when he finally reached her, the woman denied ever having had a child.
He knows that Lina has a daughter living with her parents in Italy. He knows she sends money, receives photographs, and hasn’t seen the girl in years. He knows she’s afraid she would have been a bad mother.
He still knows her as Lucie. She still knows him only as a client.
The names arrive at the doorway, after Lina’s phone reminds her that another appointment is waiting and the paid hour has already run out. She tells him her name is Lina. He tells her his is Thierry. She laughs and says it sounds like an old man’s name.
The exchange is small enough to pass as a farewell joke. Structurally, it completes the entire film. Call Me begins by reducing two people to roles — a purchasable profile and the unseen man studying it — and gradually lets those roles loosen through framing, sound, performance, physical care, and a shared history of family failure. Only after almost everything underneath has been exposed do the two people speaking finally ask who the other one is.
The intimacy doesn’t begin with their names. The names confirm that it already happened.
A Profile Can Be Called
Thierry first appears without a face. He sits with his back to the camera in a room nearly emptied by darkness. Cinematographer Nils Jacobsen holds him there long enough that his face becomes almost beside the point — because the scene has already decided the more urgent image is the one on his computer screen: a woman’s profile, broken into photographs, physical details, a list of available services, and a button glowing pale against the dark interface. Appelle-moi. Call me.
Before Lina exists as a person, she’s already available as a visual and commercial object. Thierry can study her face and body, read what she offers, and decide what he wants without exposing anything comparable about himself. The imbalance is exact: Lina is hypervisible, Thierry almost entirely withheld. The site knows her only as Lucie, and gives Thierry a vocabulary of pure selection — this woman, this service, this hour — so that he never has to introduce himself or risk the ordinary uncertainty of asking someone to stay.
He presses the button. She answers. The title arrives as a commercial command, but it’s already carrying a second meaning the film will spend the rest of its runtime uncovering. Call me can mean hire me, tell me what you want. It can also mean recognize me — know what to call me once the role stops explaining who I am.
Noun has described wanting the prostitution premise to function as the film’s surface, with something more specific hidden underneath it — one person meeting another, once the roles that first frame them start to fall away. The opening makes that recognition difficult on purpose. Thierry doesn’t call a person. He calls a profile.
He Cannot Name What He Purchased
Once Lina arrives, she understands the situation more clearly than Thierry does. She assesses the room and the man in it, and starts working through the expected possibilities out loud: he’s paid for a defined stretch of time and a specific menu of services, and she needs him to say which one he wants. If not the obvious ones, then something else — something he’ll have to name.
He can’t. The film lets this stay uncomfortable rather than immediately readable as sensitivity. From Lina’s side, a client who won’t explain himself could be indecisive, ashamed, dangerous, or after something outside the arrangement’s usual limits. Her directness is professional self-protection, not provocation.
Thierry’s actual sentence fails before it finishes: “I just want someone to…”
That’s the dramatic problem underneath the whole film. He’s chosen a form of contact where almost everything can be specified in advance — price, duration, service, boundaries — a system that can guarantee someone will arrive, but that has no listing for the thing he actually wants. His later confession explains why the arrangement appealed to him in the first place: raised in foster care and institutional custody, he never learned the ordinary rituals of approach and trust that most people absorb without noticing. Paying someone removes the most frightening part of connection — the chance that she might simply choose not to come.
But once Lina is actually in the room, the contract reaches its limit. It can supply proximity. It cannot manufacture the kind of presence he was actually asking for.
The First Touch Is Care
Lina eventually decides Thierry is another client she can’t safely read, and moves toward the door. Before she reaches it, she notices blood on his forehead — a small cut, left over from glass breaking earlier in the scene, before either of us understood what the sound meant.
The wound changes what physical contact is for. Lina doesn’t come back to perform anything Thierry purchased. She opens a first-aid kit, cleans the cut, and tells him to hold still. He, who has spent the encounter controlling how much of himself becomes visible, has to go still enough to receive care he didn’t ask for and isn’t paying extra for.
The scene doesn’t pretend the body has stopped mattering. It changes what the body is being used for. Lina’s online profile first presented her body as the object of a transaction; the film now holds on her hands doing something practical and unrequested. Thierry paid for access to her. The first touch that actually means something belongs to neither of them’s original plan.
The injury also redistributes power between them. Until now, Thierry has held the home, the payment, and the ability to summon Lina into a private space; Lina has held the professional confidence to define what happens inside it. The first-aid sequence hands each of them a different kind of vulnerability — he has to be touched without controlling the reason, and she has to decide whether the man behind the client role has earned care that was never part of the deal.
The encounter can only keep going once its expected service has already failed.
The Room Has to Close Around Them
Noun shot Call Me during France’s COVID-era curfew, inside a roughly nineteen-square-meter apartment, with a reduced crew across two days — conditions tight enough that he had to serve as his own first assistant director because the space couldn’t hold both roles at once. He later color-graded the finished film himself as well. None of this proves a deliberate metaphor between production and story. It does clarify the problem the filmmaking actually had to solve: almost the entire emotional arc had to occur inside one confined room, without new locations, without expanding geography, without cutting away to relieve the pressure. Framing, blocking, and performance had to make the same few feet keep changing meaning.
Noun has described wanting to build a kind of enclosure around the two characters that tightens as the film goes on, created through framing and sound together. The apartment begins visibly divided — Thierry at its edges, often standing, while Lina sits on the bed she expects to work from; the doorway stays in frame as an available exit; early coverage keeps the two of them in separate compositions, present in the same room without yet sharing it.
The wound starts collapsing that separation. A low insert brings Lina’s heels and Thierry’s shoes into the same frame — off, but not as preparation for sex. They end up reclined beside each other, fully clothed, heads against the same wall, and Jacobsen’s coverage shifts from isolated singles to matching close-ups and shared two-shots, giving their faces comparable scale without staging the arrangement as seduction. The bed moves in stages — presumed transaction site, Lina’s waiting room, first-aid station, neutral ground, confessional, a rough approximation of two people just talking in bed — and the room itself never gets any bigger. What changes is what the same few feet are allowed to mean.
The outside world returns through Lina’s phone. Another client is waiting. The enclosure can only hold for as long as the schedule that created it allows.
The Room Has No Score
Noun made an unusually consequential choice for a film built around loneliness, abandonment, and family grief: he withheld music almost entirely. He’s described avoiding cliché and easy pathos as the most important challenge in telling this particular story, and the absence of a score as part of that discipline — a way of refusing to cue the audience toward sympathy a subject this loaded could otherwise coast on.
It’s a meaningful refusal. A score could easily reassure the audience that Thierry is harmless before Lina has enough information to reach that conclusion herself, or announce the exact moment a professional encounter turns emotionally sincere. Instead, whatever enclosure the film builds around its two characters is constructed entirely from what’s already in the room: breathing, the rustle of a coat coming off, footsteps, the handling of first-aid supplies, a pause neither character knows how to fill, a phone vibrating against a table. Sound editor and mixer Lamine Bouaziz’s work is doing exactly this kind of quiet load-bearing — without a score to lean on, every tonal shift in the scene has to be legible in what’s already audible, or it isn’t legible at all.
That restraint falls hardest, and most productively, on the two performances. Kévin J. Ziane and Céline Berti have to carry every transition — suspicion into curiosity, small talk into confession, guardedness into recognition — through rhythm, hesitation, and posture alone, with nothing handed off to another department. Lina in particular is never granted easy sentimental access: she stays funny, guarded, and practical until the conversation itself earns the shift, not because music tells the audience to start looking for a wounded woman underneath the professional one.
The Roles Protect the Truth
The anonymity between Thierry and Lina looks, at first, like the main obstacle to intimacy. It’s also what makes the intimacy possible.
Thierry hasn’t called someone who will be part of his life tomorrow. Lina hasn’t entered the home of someone she expects to see again. The encounter has a predetermined ending, and neither of them has to protect the version of themselves on display once the door closes. That impermanence is doing real work: Thierry can talk about his mother because Lina has no place in his family or his future; Lina can talk about Anna because Thierry has no standing in her life to preserve. The roles that reduce them — Lucie, a body and a service list; the client, a payment and a possible risk — are the same roles giving them somewhere to hide while telling the truth.
Even the humor runs on this instability. Lina tells him about the range of people who hire her — businessmen, older clients, younger ones, people she’d rather forget — and they end up laughing together about the worst of it. The laughter doesn’t erase the economic structure sitting underneath the conversation. It lets them stand next to it for a minute and look at it together instead of only through it.
At one point Lina names what actually feels different about tonight: this is the first time a client has treated her like a person instead of an object. The line is explicit, but the film has already done the work visually — the profile photographs, the advertised services, the guarded doorway have gradually given way to a woman with professional judgment, humor, family history, and a name Thierry still doesn’t know. Thierry is undergoing the mirrored shift: from an unseen customer Lina has every reason to categorize quickly, into a specific man whose strangeness turns out to have a history. Neither of them stops occupying the role they arrived in. The role simply stops being sufficient.
Their Families Meet Before They Do
Noun has identified shared family suffering as the actual point of contact between his two characters, and the screenplay builds it as an imperfect mirror: Thierry is a child without a mother; Lina is a mother without her child.
Lina’s daughter, Anna, lives in Italy with Lina’s parents. Lina sends money and receives photographs but hasn’t seen her in almost four years, and she tells Thierry she worries she’d have been a bad mother if she’d stayed. Thierry moved through foster homes and institutional care, eventually tracing his birth mother, Jacqueline, through records and searches that took years. When he finally reached her by phone, she denied ever having had a child and hung up. He tells Lina he had imagined that conversation a thousand different ways — which names the real loss precisely: not just the reunion he didn’t get, but every version of it he’d already lived through in his head.
Ziane plays the confession without turning Thierry into a suddenly eloquent victim; the awkwardness established from the film’s opening stays intact even here. Berti’s Lina doesn’t become a therapist or a surrogate — she listens, asks questions, and only gradually lets his history reach the fear underneath her own account of Anna. Thierry tells her she’s brave, that no child should be ashamed of her — and then warns her not to repeat his mother’s mistake.
That’s compassionate, and it’s also incomplete. Jacqueline denied Thierry’s existence outright. Lina sends money and photographs and believes, by her own account, that she’s protecting her daughter. Thierry can see Lina more clearly than most of her clients precisely because of what happened to him — but he may also be seeing his mother inside a woman whose relationship to her child isn’t actually the same shape. The film lets his wound become insight without fully separating it from projection.
The Names Arrive Last
Lina’s phone eventually breaks the enclosure. Another client is waiting; whatever this hour has become, it’s still running on paid time, and she can’t stay simply because Thierry has finally learned how to talk to her.
At the door, he asks the simplest question in the film: what’s her name. She tells him — Lina — which also confirms that Lucie belonged to the profile, not to a lie. A professional alias can be a boundary rather than a disguise, a way of controlling what a client gets access to rather than a mask hiding someone more honest underneath; Lina isn’t more real than Lucie, she’s just more privately available. She asks his name in return. Thierry. She laughs, tells him it sounds like an old man’s name.
The joke releases the tension of the goodbye, but it also briefly imagines what an ordinary version of this meeting might have looked like — two people trading names, laughing, deciding whether to keep talking. The film places that ordinary beginning at the very end. By the time Thierry and Lina know what to call each other, they already know who was abandoned, who left, who is still searching, whose child is growing up somewhere else. The professional identities made those confessions possible because both of them believed the encounter would stay temporary. The real names only arrive once that protection is about to disappear — which means the recognition becomes explicit at the exact moment it’s least useful for keeping them together. It doesn’t promise a future. It’s what makes the ending hurt, because a future has become thinkable for the first time in the same breath it becomes impossible.
The Call Changes Direction
After Lina leaves, Thierry is alone in the frame again — one body on a bed that briefly held two. Nothing about the room has permanently changed because two people understood each other in it for an hour.
Then his phone rings. He looks at it, answers, and says “Hello?” Editor Benoît Bureau’s cut goes to black before the caller is identified or a reply becomes audible.
It’s the same word that opened the film, doing the opposite job. The first “Hello?” purchased an arrival — Thierry paying to guarantee someone would show up on schedule. This one reaches him from outside his control, answered by a man who, for the first time in the film, has a name someone might actually be asking for. Noun has said he wanted to avoid both the conventional romance and the conventional client-and-sex-worker story; withholding the caller’s identity is consistent with that refusal. The film isn’t interested in confirming that Lina calls back, or that love was the point. What it commits to is narrower and more exact: Thierry can be reached at all.
The Cost of Looking Beneath the Surface
This method carries real costs, worth naming plainly rather than folding into admiration for how cleanly the mechanism runs.
The transaction never disappears, and it’s still the clock the whole scene runs on. Whatever Thierry and Lina discover in each other, her time has been purchased and another client is waiting; the paid structure isn’t a false surface the film discards once real feeling shows up; it’s the mechanism that made the meeting possible and the reason it has to end on schedule regardless of what happened inside the hour. That also means the honesty this essay has been admiring was safe specifically because it had no future — Thierry and Lina could tell each other the truth precisely because neither expected to face any consequences for it.
Lina’s profession becomes evidence in an argument about her motherhood. The film gives her humor, boundaries, and professional competence, but it still routes her arc through Thierry’s warning not to repeat his mother’s mistake — which quietly implies the thing standing between Lina and Anna isn’t only distance, but the life and work she’s built in the meantime. The economic and personal conditions that actually produced her situation stay almost entirely outside the room.
Thierry’s two abandonments aren’t equivalent, and the film mostly treats them as if they are. His mother denied him outright; Lina sends money and photographs and believes, by her own account, that she’s protecting her daughter. His moral authority on the subject comes entirely from his own wound, and the film gives it more weight than it necessarily deserves.
Anna never becomes a person in her own right. She exists through photographs, money, distance, and two adults’ competing interpretations of what she needs. The film’s emotional logic points toward reunion without ever giving her a voice in the question — understandable in a fourteen-minute two-character short, but it does mean Lina’s most consequential relationship is defined entirely by the people in Thierry’s apartment.
The withheld caller lets the ending hold several possibilities at once without settling any of them. That refusal is disciplined rather than evasive — Noun has been explicit about not wanting a romantic bow on this story — but it also means the film gets to suggest that something in Thierry’s life has changed without committing to what that change would actually require of him next.
Closing
Noun has described Call Me as built around two levels: what’s visible on the surface, and what people are hiding underneath it. The surface here is plain enough — a man calls an escort, she arrives at his apartment, he’s paid for a service, she has another client after him. The film never denies any of that. It just stops treating it as sufficient.
The profile can’t contain Lina’s daughter. The category of client can’t contain Thierry’s childhood. The menu of services has no listing for companionship. The bed doesn’t stay a workplace. The alias doesn’t explain the woman using it. Noun and Jacobsen tighten the room around their two performers until the external labels lose their authority, and the absence of music keeps the film from ever announcing when suspicion should become sympathy. Thierry is searching for the mother who refused him; Lina is trying to live at a distance from the daughter she loves. Their pain doesn’t match perfectly. It gives them just enough common language to see past the roles that brought them into the same room.
Then the phone announces that the hour is over. At the door, after everything that actually mattered has already been said, Lucie becomes Lina. The client becomes Thierry.
The first call purchases an arrival. The last one reaches someone who, for the first time, isn’t anonymous.