Japan, 2001
Directed by Kon Satoshi
(Animated movie)
What lies behind a successful career in filmmaking? Luck, of course, with a producer noticing your face by chance, getting impressed, and then stubbornly talking you into seizing the opportunity he has in mind. Then there is hard work and willingness to play as many parts as possible, exploring many styles and genres, switching without hesitation from melodrama to noir, from neorealist highbrow projects to tacky sci-fi entertainment. And there could be a highly personal motivation. In the case of the revered actress Fujiwara Chiyoko this is actually this last element that has always mattered.
She once bumped in her town’s snowy streets into a mysterious, attractive, and young painter chased away by cops. She helped him escape the police, hid him away to nurse his wounds, and talked with him. Both were clearly seduced by each other and before fleeing again he gave her a key that would open the most important thing in the world. Obsessed by this brief but amazing encounter, Fujiwara Chiyoko decided to look for him at any cost, to give him back the key, and to stay with him far longer. She inferred from their nightly chat that he was bound to go to a very cold land and it happened that this was the kind of place where the producer who yearned for her planned to make his new movie. So off to Manchuria she went – and so began her career.
The film is not a linear narrative arc focused on her actions. It actually describes the interview the actress, who retired from business a long time ago, gives to the employee of a production company, Tachibana Genya, and his cameraman, Ida Kyoji. The first minutes emphasize how keen Tachibana Genya is to conduct this interview he has coveted for a long time, and the sturdy and grumpy middle-aged fellow displays incredibly emotional attitudes and reactions that surprise Ida Kyoji and suggest there is a deeper reason spurring him. The plot does not waste time to show the most concrete aspect of his motivation: as soon as the gentle septuagenarian is settled on a couch, ready to talk, he pushes towards her a little box; when she opens she discovers a key which turns out to be the stuff her life was made of.
The whole story is developed all along the interview, the key standing as the symbol of the actress’ life which has been the pursuit of the man she met by chance and put a spell on her. It becomes clear that her quest has influenced key choices of her career, Fujiwara Chiyoko tending to play female characters longing for a man who has vanished from their life, usually carried away by tragic historical events. The types of productions that featured her skills reflect the evolution of the Japanese cinema and the nation’s troubled political history while her relations with some movie personalities are tinged by her own personal quest. Her story, as disclosed by the interview, blurs the lines between individual torment, job career, arts, and history in a dizzying manner.
But the film injects an even more surprising and confusing element: in many of the movie scenes she evokes and that oddly reflects the events of her life and her state of mind Tachibana Genya readily appears to play key roles. The interviewer jumps over the hurdles of reality and tact to intrude in what should be her own images, making a point or acting in her name. Aren’t we supposed to shoot a documentary, asks Ida Kyoji, who keeps tagging along his boss in the most absurd way and is literally overwhelmed by the turn of events, or rather the quick transformation of the images he is taking part to – as a cameraman but arguably also as a movie character whose part should have been carefully delineated.
But the weight of emotions driving the story makes it impossible. The other essential, intimate element of the film that is as slowly revealed as the secret of the actress is the bonds existing between Tachibana Genya and Fujiwara Chiyoko and the boundless admiration, verging on adulation, the former has for the latter, articulating the real reasons for this interview and turning the actress’ story into the story of a fan.
Juggling with time-frames, media and points of view is nothing new for director Kon Satoshi – this wowing and brash ability to explode perceptions and to shift lines and logic shaped his groundbreaking and breathtaking 1997 debut feature, “Perfect Blue”. Still, the move from one visual and intellectual component of the narrative right into another is in this 2001 feature remarkably seamless and boundless, with a focused energy allowing drawn lines and colored forms to morph immediately and orderly before we fully realize what is going on and nary a single transitional trick. It is a dizzying experience of continuity that bolsters the deeper sense of fusion at the heart of the plot.
If the lead character in “Perfect Blue” was struggling to keep control of her own images and life in a creepy world where technology, media, and personal expectations were fabricating and altering these images and life, the lead characters in “Millennium Actress” are rather glad to retrieve and relive their past, if only because what they help to create – as an actress or, in the case of Tachibana Genya, as a shooting assistant – was also making sense to their lives. Art and life have fully merged in Fujiwara Chiyoko’s case while Tachibana Genya intents to keep his dreams as alive as possible. The emotional, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes befuddling, comments and reactions they have in the course of the interview point to a genuine pleasure to evoke what have been great moments in the making of the national cinema.
Even if real feelings are the drivers of their behaviors – the actress always looking for the loved one and the assistant always anxious to help her – which grounds them into the realm of human sensibility and experience and means they are not just elements of fantasy or concept, the fullest expression of love they happened to find is the creation of moving pictures, whose mojo, by the way, is tainted by human flaws the film underlines, from petty rivalries between individuals to the changing economic constraints of movie production.
For the director, there is undoubtedly the pleasure to shoot a sweeping and moving story evoking the whole history of the Japanese cinema, from the 1930s melodramas to the Godzilla dramas to the samurai movies, with allusions to masters like Kurosawa Akira or Ozu Yasujirô. The film hinges on a fierce desire to pay tribute to the art of filmmaking and the impact it has on the popular imagination. The part played by Tachibana Genya is not just clever, an astute development in the actress’ quest for a key and a lover, but also asserts the role the audience has in keeping films alive even after the screening is off. It is Tachibana Genya who helps the narrative come into being and it is the death of Fujiwara Chiyoko which brings it to the end, after she said everything that was needed to say and got the symbol of her life back. The plot comes to a round circle in the same amazingly fluid and smart manner presiding over the depiction of the details and their gathering. You cannot doubt it: yes, cinema does create perfect forms and record deep emotions.