Millennium Actress (2001)

Sennenyoyu

This one marks the last of Satoshi Kon’s feature films that we’ve slowly watched over the last couple of years. Both of us have actually seen this years ago but that was probably before I could appreciate it properly. This time around, while this isn’t the most sophisticated of the late director’s films (I think Perfect Blue deserves this honor), it’s easily the most likable and touching for me.

Genya Tachibana is a television show host who tracks down a retired actress Chiyoko Fujiwara for an interview. With his cameraman Kyoji Ida in tow, he asks the reclusive actress about how she got into acting and the highlights of her career. In particular she revealed that she became an actress not because of any particular love for the profession, but because she had met a mysterious man while a teenaged girl and had fallen in love with him. The man turned out to be an anti-government activist and was constantly on the run. Becoming an actress then was Chiyoko’s path to travel around Japan to search for him though try as she might she would always be one step behind. As Chiyoko tells the story of her life however, not only does it come to life before their eyes but both Genya and Kyoji become immersed in it as if they had traveled back in time. It also emerges that though Chiyuko has forgotten it, Genya himself once worked as an assistant in the same movie studio as Chiyuko and therefore played a part in her life.

One reason why Kon’s can be difficult to watch is that he often has fantastical or dream-like elements intrude into the waking world and it can get confusing whether these elements are real or part of the fevered imaginations of his characters. He uses the same trick in Millennium Actress but here the distinction either is fairly clear or else doesn’t matter at all to the plot. The main thread of the film, in which Genya interviews Chiyoko in her house, remains unambiguously clear throughout and while at times it feels as if some elements from her memories mysteriously leak through to the present, you’re free to bask in the magical quality of the past without being bothered by how everything fits together. To me, this is a key reason why this film works so well.

I think my wife wanted to rewatch this mainly because she remembered it as being an effective love story. I don’t think this really is much of a love story as the final line of the film reveals and the object of Chiyuko’s search is always such an elusive and mysterious character that they never even have a real relationship of any sort. But what it does do exceptionally well is capture the feeling of eternally yearning for and seeking after love. This ties in perfectly with the very Japanese quality of valuing the ephemeral and the indescribable that recurs so often in their art and their poetry. There is something very silly in all this as Chiyuko herself seems self-aware enough to realize and to the audience sometimes the film feels like nothing more than an endless montage of the characters she plays chasing after a man that she can never catch up with. But the sentiment that is captured here is nevertheless a powerful one.

Another powerful force that this film mercilessly deploys is nostalgia. The story that Chiyuko tells is ultimately one of a full life well-lived beginning with the early moments when Japan’s invasion of Manchuria was thought by the nation to be a glorious and noble endeavor, to the travails of the Second World War, past it to the penury of the post-war reconstruction period and finally to the modern, industrialized and commercial Japan. In a way as the genres of film that Chiyuko works in shifts over time, it’s also a capsule history of Japanese cinema. She starts with samurai films, moves on to a vision of Japan that is modernized according to the Western fashion, then to films that set during the war itself and finally on to Godzilla-like monster movies and even science-fiction adventures. Through it all, her quest for the mysterious man remains the one constant of her life even while her relationships with others change. There’s more than a hint here of the old idea that every story is the same story, every film that a great director makes is the same film and every character that a great actor plays is the same character and this is alright as there is magic in it all the same.

The end result is a film that is as full of wonder as Chiyuko’s eventful life has been. As my wife commented, after watching so many of the films by Satoshi Kon it is now obvious to us how the director always resorts to the same bag of tricks over and over again. At the same time, Millennium Actress is probably the best example of his techniques being used to their best effect in a story that is relatively simple but with rich themes that complement his style well. If you watch nothing else by Kon, you should watch this.

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