Timothee Chalamet wears a Casio F-91W

Elio plays the piano shirtless in his family's villa, and the wrist working the keys carries two things at once: a loop of red beads and a small black Casio. Timothee Chalamet plays Elio Perlman in Call Me by Your Name, the seventeen-year-old son of an American professor whose household takes in a graduate student every summer. This is the summer of 1983, the place is northern Italy, and the student is Oliver, a poised twenty-four-year-old from the States. Weeks of swimming and slow afternoons pass before the two of them say what is between them.

The watch is a Casio F-91W, the cheap black digital Casio has sold since June 1989. It is a resin case of 37.5 by 34.5 millimeters on a resin strap, 21 grams all in, with module 593 stamped on a steel back and a CR2016 cell rated to run seven years. By 2026 Casio had made about 100 million of them, which makes it the best-selling watch in the world. None of that helps the film. The F-91W did not exist in 1983; it reached wrists six years after the summer the film recreates. GQ, writing about his breakout role, called the watch cheap and anachronistic, and both are true.

On Elio the slip never shows, because no one in a 1983 idyll is checking a Casio against its release date. The actor wearing it went the other way. Chalamet became a Cartier ambassador and, by GQ's account, spent the press tour for Marty Supreme in vintage Urban Jurgensen, a long way from the ten-dollar Casio that made his name.