100 Days of Anime: Day Seventy Three – Millennium Actress

Title: Millennium Actress
Run time: 87 minutes
Released: 2001
Director: Satoshi Kon
Studio: Madhouse

Millennium Actress was, for me at least, a challenging film. It tells a fairly simple story at a break neck pace through a series of seamless scene transitions that never quite let me settle in. Satoshi Kon’s second film was originally meant to be Paprika, but financial troubles for the distributors of his first film Perfect Blue forced a change of plans.

Millenium Actress is a spiritual successor to Perfect Blue, telling a similar story from a different perspective. At its core, there’s nothing too radical about the story itself. An interviewer and his camera man manage to line up an interview with a reclusive retired actress. They meet, and she tells them how chasing a lost love shaped her life.

Such a story would be perfectly at home in live action Western cinema. It could be played as a straight period piece. Even with fantastical elements, it wouldn’t be all that different from films like Big Fish. But this is a Satoshi Kon movie. It’s not going to be played straight.

The interviewers are sucked into actress Chiyoko’s story, sometimes taking part in it themselves. Her memories are a mix of real events and movie scenes from her acting career. They all tell the same story, and for much of the film it is unclear if what we’re seeing is reality, cinema or a blending of the two. It is never entirely sure if a moment is factually true within the story or if it is just the tidiest way to explain a major turning point in Chiyoko’s story.

For instance, Chiyoko finds a treasured possession, a key, while she is cleaning what appears to be her husband’s study. This is an item she believed she lost before getting married. Her husband enters the study, and she confronts him. The camera moves, revealing they’re on a movie set of the study, and Chiyoko’s rival, a slightly older actress appears. The rival admits to having stolen the key years earlier to help Chiyoko’s eventual husband.

The reality of this scene is wholly unclear and wholly unimportant. How Chiyoko found the key and learned the truth about its disappearance matters much less to the overall story than the fact that she did find the key and learn the truth. In these crucial moments, Kon opts for narrative simplicity so that he can focus on the dramatic weight of the scene and the beauty and illusion of its unveiling.

There is no fat on this story. Kon shows us what we need to see to understand what is happening. Decades of relationships and rivalries are implied rather than shown. Kon chooses to use the run time on the most important moments, sometimes replaying essential ones over and over.

Early in the movie and in the chronology of Chiyoko’s story, our heroine has an encounter with an artist and revolutionary who she helps hide from the authorities. He gives her a key, and disappears from her life. This brief encounter sets up a lifetime of chasing after a shadowy figure from her youth.

We see variations on this encounter over and over as Chiyoko comes back to that moment again and again. We also see Chiyoko running toward her mysterious love interest repeatedly. In fact, Chiyoko runs so often that Satoshi Kon filmed a girl running and showed it to the animation staff so that they would have a solid frame of reference for this motif.

Unlike Paprika, Millennium Actress is Kon’s story (along with screenwriter Sadayuki Murai) so I’m especially interested in trying to tap into his influences here. No less than 10 minutes into the movie, I was reminded of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Genya Tachibana, the interviewer, is happy to lose himself in fantasy and is chasing after Chiyoko, who he has been infatuated with since he was a young man. His cameraman Ida is every bit the Sancho Panza to Tachibana’s Quixote, never quite as caught up in the fantasy world, a little in awe of his partner’s imagination and ever willing to point out just how bizarre things are getting.

Chiyoko herself isn’t exactly immune to some Quixote-style madness herself. She started her acting career just to try to find a man whose name she didn’t even know. Their time together was so brief she can’t even recall his face, but she spent most of her youth chasing him, only stopping thanks to a cruel trick.

That’s really all I’ve got to say about Millennium Actress now. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up Satoshi Kon. Saturday we’re moving on to Makoto Shinkai with The Garden of Words. Until tomorrow!