Millennium Actress
 Mike Toole  rates it:    

Auteur director Satoshi Kon gave us a very interesting film in 1995's Perfect Blue-- his first movie was a taut, meticulously crafted, visually warped little suspense thriller. To be honest, I expected more of the same in his brand-new Millennium Actress (which only opens in Japan this month), which I had the opportunity to take in at the Big Apple Anime Fest. But Kon took me, and the rest of the audience, by surprise-- Millennium Actress employs Kon's taste for suspense and many of his excellent visual tricks, but at its heart, it has warmth and humor that Perfect Blue lacks. It's an exceptional movie, equal parts love story, period piece, and drama, with generous bits of comedy and action stirred into the mix. With Millennium Actress, Kon has easily sidestepped the "sophmore curse" that sometimes plagues directors' second films, putting forth what might just be the first truly great animated film to hit U.S. audiences in 2003.

Genya Tachibana is a documentary filmmaker who seems content to live vicariously through the movies he studies, in particular through a long string of movies starring Chiyoko Fujiwara, a starlet who'd dominated Japan's film industry in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. When Ginei, the long-since-defunct studio which produced Chiyoko's movies, is set to be razed, Tachibana takes it upon himself to make a documentary about the studio-- and ends up finding something that inspires him to set up a meeting with the now-elderly actress.

It's not that easy, though. For some reason, Chiyoko went into seclusion decades prior, and hasn't been seen in public for a very long time. She's reluctant to see visitors, but something about Genya's story inspires her to allow Genya, along with Ida, his youthful, cynical cameraman, to conduct an interview with her. Naturally, Genya is delighted (and hilariously nervous, especially considering his fierce, bearded visage and large frame) to meet his idol, and eager to learn about the details of her career-- and, perhaps, why she went into hiding so many years ago.

What follows is... well, quite frankly, pure cinematic joy. Kon skillfully uses the story outline detailed above as a vehicle to describe the life of Chiyoko, from her youth as a schoolgirl in pre-WWII Japan to her greatest successes of the late 1950s and beyond. But it's not enough for Chiyoko's life to be depicted as a simple series of flashbacks-- Kon uses portions of the fictional movies she starred in (all carefully modeled to resemble real-life Japanese movies of the time) as a means of telling her life's story. It's a marvelous cinematic trick that's a little difficult to describe, and it gets even more complicated when Genya and Ida are drawn into the action. The thing is, it's not enough for Chiyoko to star in her own flashbacks and films-- in Kon's eyes (and, therefore, the viewer's), Chiyoko's recollections are so vivid that the two men feel like they're actually witnessing her life unfold before them. And so they are, with remarkably entertaining results.

Chiyoko's life as an actress is interesting enough to support the film on its own, but again, that simply isn't enough for Kon. An encounter with a mysterious artist early in her life makes a deep impression on her, such that she spends much of her life pursuing the mystery man, desperate for answers-- and Kon eagerly follows suit, carefully editing the various scenes from her movies to reflect these themes of pursuit and yearning. Amusingly, the same characters (including a snooty older actress and a stern, scar-faced authority figure) keep making appearances, almost always playing the same 'part'. All told, the presentation of the story is dazzling and completely engrossing, and Kon pulls it off perfectly.

Through this visually intoxicating cinematic technique, Millennium Actress forges its own world, a world of passion and danger and wistfulness. It's filled out nicely by the character designs of Kon himself, and further defined by the tight, lucid scriptwriting of Sadayuki Murai. I wish I could cite the film's art director, because Millennium Actress's costume and color designs are spectacular as well. Unfortunately, the cast list wasn't available to me at the time of this review, but I will say that the cast all perform excellently-- in particular, the three actresses who play Chiyoko at various stages in her life really breathe life into the character convincingly. Topping off the near-perfect execution of the film is Susumu Hirasawa's (Berserk) surging, pulsing musical score, featuring "Lotus", one of his typically hypnotic vocal songs.

It's rather difficult to summarize Millennium Actress's story, because unlike in most films, the story is not the most important part of the movie. Kon seems far more interested in communicating the moods and themes of Chiyoko's life, drawing upon the library of her films to communicate emotions rather than just pushing the story along. Like I keep repeating, it's a really interesting technique-- while not necessarily linear, it makes sense in the context of the movie, and it gives Millennium Actress a rare sense of style.

With Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon essentially serves up a slice of magic realism that would be right at home with the works of Laura Esquivel or Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. The movie doesn't concern itself with fantasy or science fiction (despite numerous scenes of these types of movies that Chiyoko starred in, including a brilliantly-used repeating space cruiser launch sequence), but with an understated sort of magic-- magic that can alter people's perceptions in the real world, if it's communicated through the emotions of someone in love.

Satoshi Kon's done a wonderful and outrageous thing in Millennium Actress-- he's managed to sidestep or ignore pretty much every anime and Japanese cinema cliche in the book, only pausing occasionally to lampoon them in scenes from Chiyoko's movies (watch out for the carefully altered Absolutely-Not-Godzilla in one scene). Millennium Actress is a wildly visceral visual ride, but it's also a marvellous modern fairytale. Even the best movies rarely get this good.

Added:  Wednesday, October 08, 2003

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