Millennium Actress

2001. Movie. 87 min. Drama. dir Satoshi Kon. scr Satoshi Kon, Sadayuki Murai. mus Susumu Hirasawa. des Satoshi Kon, Takeshi Honda. -bc

Millennium Actress is the chronicle of a Japanese film star and her emotional journey through Japan’s turbulent past, told in an innovative style that relies on the framing device of a TV documentary about her life. A whirling array of beautiful images from Japanese history and culture go back and forth in time and between real life and “reel” life in the service of a highly unusual love story.

In the year 2000, on the occasion of the demolition of Tokyo’s Ginei Studios, film producer Genya Tachibana and his cameraman, Torakichi, track down the studio’s reclusive former star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, to make a documentary about her. Living in a mountain hideaway after retiring thirty years earlier, she tells her story to them, starting from the time she was discovered as an adolescent by the studio head. The dominant thread of Chiyoko’s life is embodied in a key given to her on the very day she went to the studio for the first time by a painter, an anti-government rebel on the run from the police. As the years pass, we see her in her youth, in scenes that gradually intersect with re-creations of scenes from her films, including historical fight sequences in which she wields a mean sword and leaps around like a ninja. Through it all, Genya and Torakichi are with her, filming every moment even when the scene shifts hundreds of years to the past. In each scene set in the past, she is preoccupied with one thing—saving a fugitive or trying to reunite with him.

In real life, she tries to keep track of her rebel painter’s whereabouts and her path crosses fleetingly with his once or twice, but after the war she holds onto the key and plunges into her movie career hoping he’ll see one of her movies and find her. When she loses the key, she marries her director, Otaki. Later on she finds the key and learns the truth of its theft. (During the course of these scenes it is revealed that Tachibana was, at the time, an assistant to Otaki, and worshipped Chiyoko from afar, a surprise to both Chiyoko and the cameraman.) When she gets a report that her lost love has returned north to Hokkaido to paint she drops everything and heads north on a fruitless quest. The truth of the painter’s ultimate fate is eventually revealed, but not to Chiyoko, who, in her last days, finally declares, “After all, it’s the chasing after him I really love.”

The music for the film was composed by Susumu Hirasawa, a prominent musician and electronic/experimental composer in Japan famous for his techno pop band, P-Model, formed in 1979. He has scored other anime, including Berserk, Detonator Orgun, and director Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent.

The film is awash in references to Japanese history and cinema, and includes a host of meticulous re-creations of historical eras and film styles with old Kyoto figuring prominently in one scene and the Meiji era in another, as well as 1930s Tokyo and wartime Manchuria. In the historical swordplay scenes, the style of camerawork employed in live-action films is replicated by the animators. One scene even takes place on the moon, re-creating a scene from a 2001: A Space Odyssey–style sci-fi epic. Another montage shows Chiyoko traveling by rickshaw, then early-model automobile, then bicycle through an array of beautifully colored backgrounds designed to re-create 18th-century color woodblock prints (called nishiki-é) and record the passing of historical eras in Japan. It’s a stunning sequence and stands out as a true work of Japanese animated art.

Other beautiful artwork is sprinkled throughout the film, including the billboards advertising Chiyoko’s films and the magazine covers touting her new films. Most memorable, however, is the detailed portrait of young Chiyoko done by her lost love, the fugitive painter, found in the bombed-out rubble of Tokyo painted directly on the one remaining wall of her family’s shop, with a legend alongside it, “Until the day we meet again.” Chiyoko manages to salvage the piece of wall and frame the painting, keeping it with her till the end. Such a gift, we come to understand, is sufficient to fuel a lifetime of unrequited longing.

Director Kon generally insists on creating characters who are recognizably Japanese, and he does that with all the characters here as well. As with Mima in Perfect Blue, however, Chiyoko has wider, rounder eyes than the others to make her stand out as a wide-eyed innocent and also to allow her to convey greater emotions than the others. She ages from adolescent to senior citizen, a process performed so painstakingly, including the use of three different voice actresses to portray her at different ages, that it is arguably more believable than a comparable live-action performance. When we first see Chiyoko, she’s at her oldest, but then the film flashes back to her at fifteen and gradually follows her various stages of womanhood from the 1940s to the 1970s, and back again in 2000. This kind of character aging from young to very old is rarely seen in anime characters, even among the cast of Dragon Ball Z.

As in the director’s previous work, Perfect Blue and the “Magnetic Rose” segment of Memories, Millennium Actress finds ways to blend real life and re-created life, flowing seamlessly from one to the other, as when the interview in Chiyoko’s parlor moves to an incident from her past to a role in a film and back again. The “real” begins to blend with the “scripted,” especially when both share the running theme of the pursuit of a lost love. Unlike his earlier works, however, Millennium is not restricted to one time period, but moves through many eras in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, occasionally getting back on historical track but then veering off again without warning. As a result, the film develops a unique rhythm and style of its own, quite unlike anything previously attempted in anime.

Kon is fascinated with female star performers who undergo great change in their lives, as seen in Eva Friedel, the retired opera singer encountered in the “Magnetic Rose” segment of Memories, and Mima Kirigoe, the idol singer who switches careers in Perfect Blue. In Millennium, Chiyoko goes through even greater changes, all visualized in a variety of guises, costumes, and settings, some from her actual life, some from her film roles. For a nation emerging from the defeat and devastation of WWII, Chiyoko comes to represent the idealized image of Japanese womanhood, but she’s motivated less by patriotic sentiments than by the pursuit of a lost love, a man she met only fleetingly when she was an adolescent. However, one of her final lines may be a clue to her real agenda, “After all, it’s the chasing after him I really love.” Perhaps what Kon is really showing us is a woman who used the chase as an excuse to break out of traditional sex roles and achieve more than the circumscribed social life waiting for her, had she followed her mother’s wishes to get married and inherit the family shop. The greater freedom afforded by her choice is played out in her film roles, from ninja warrior to scientist in Godzilla movies to moon-landing astronaut (foreshadowed by Eva Friedel’s solo sojourn in space).

One can interpret Millennium Actress in other ways, but Kon has intentionally not made it easy for viewers to determine what his point is and some may complain about the lack of clear-cut answers at the end. But then, films like this are designed for viewers who can enjoy the ride, who look out the windows at the wondrous sights passing by and hear the beautiful sounds. In short, for viewers who can appreciate the journey without constantly worrying about the destination, Millennium Actress takes viewers on a breathtaking ride through hundreds of years of Japanese history and culture and seventy years of Japanese cinema in a way that never loses sight of the single consciousness that guides us through it all.

The aforementioned montage of Chiyoko traveling through different eras of Japanese history by rickshaw, automobile, and bicycle is the film’s standout sequence.

Chiyoko Fujiwara is not based on any one particular actress, but is something of a composite portrait of classic Japanese film stars, along with ample doses of idealized qualities supplied by director Kon’s active imagination. One famous name, however, that was cited in interviews with Kon was Setsuko Hara, a postwar favorite of many top Japanese directors including Yasujiro Ozu (for whom she starred in six films) and Akira Kurosawa.

During one of the historical sequences, young Chiyoko is cursed by an old witch operating a spinning wheel, who tells her she will “burn in the flames of eternal love.” The witch is a reference to a scene in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

advisory No objectionable content and certainly suitable for the whole family, but may not be of much interest to restless younger viewers (under nine).