|
Manga artist Satoshi Kon (Japan, 1963) debuted as an anime filmmaker with
the psychological thriller Pafekuto Buru/ Perfect Blue (1997),
adapted from Yoshikazu Takeuchi's novel,
worthy of the films by Hitchcock, DePalma and Polansky in which they
explored a woman's psychosis.
Besides the 19th century topics of the doppelganger and the relationship between art and life (fiction and reality), the film deals with the modern topics of pop culture, fandom, mass media and the Internet.
Superficially, the film is about a deranged personality that loses the ability
to distinguish what is real from what is not.
At another level it is a story of a sweet innocent everyday girl who is
"raped" by the world: growing up means losing her innocence, abandoning
her childhood dreams for a lucrative career.
The plot is typical Hitchcock: someone is affected by a serious case of "dissociative identity disorder", and Kon makes it difficult for us to figure out who.
There are at least three potential killers. There is Mima, who is obviously losing her mind after she splits between being a singer and being an actress, as she herself is not sure about what is real and what is not. Then there is Rumi, her protective agent, who used to be a pop star, and would like Mima to remain a pop star, and became obsessed with living Mima's life as a singer. And then there is the fan and stalker Me-Mania, who spies on her and records every detail of her private life, and who feels betrayed by her loss of (artistic) virginity, and blames both her and her entourage for it. All three are angry at the singer Mima and have a motive to kill the people responsible for "raping" her. All three have a motive to murder those who have destroyed singer Mima's innocence. The one who looks like a killer is Me-Mania, a silent and methodical voyeur. The one who doesn't look like a killer is Rumi, who is always rational and compassionate. And, yet, Rumi turns out to be the evil one: she manipulates Mima into believing that she is a crazy serial killer, when in fact Mima is; she dresses like singer Mima because she wants Mima to be the singer, and wants Mima to be the singer to feel that she herself is a successful singer, and the camouflage is also a punishment for Mima the actress, trying to drive Mima crazy.
Kon stages the fictional equivalent of a three-card monte. Since the protagonist of the story is Mima, we initially take it for granted that she must be the victim and someone else the mad person; but then we are led to believe that Mima is the one losing her mind, that she is the madwoman and the people around her are the victims; but then we progressively get more and more clues that it can't be her, that she is the victim of a diabolical machination. So we get back where we started, with the presumption of her innocence, except that now we appreciate the degree of psychological manipulation.
To further confuse the viewer, Kon continuously and abruptly switches between Mima's apartment and the set, between her ordinary life and her acting life.
And to further confuse the viewer, there is a film inside the film, and that film ends twice with two different endings, implying that one happens only in a dream: a dream of a film that happens inside a film about a film.
At the end of the film we learn that it is Rumi, not Mima, who has a split personality. It is Rumi, a failed singer turned agent who presumably invented the career of Mima the singer, who believes she is a young singer and murders the people whom she perceives as enemies of her artistic life. Mima instead is an actress who plays a role in a movie about a woman who, like Rumi, is suffering from a split personality and murders people whom she perceives as enemies. By accident, Mima's role in the movie parallels Rumi's role in real life.
We also realize that in several scenes the film has shown us Rumi's mind, not Mima's life: we saw Mima because Rumi thinks she is Mima. In a sense, the film is the story seen from the viewpoint of Rumi, the failed singer who dreams of still being an aspiring singer, not from the viewpoint of Mima, the successful singer and aspiring actress.
Rumi's psychological pressure on Mima is initially subtle but nonetheless effective in sowing doubt into Mima's mind: at first Mima is simply torn between her new career and the old one, her old identity as a singer and the new one as an actress, but then she experiences an increasingly more severe mental breakdown, where she has visions of a doppelganger, and eventually she suspects of being mad and even of being a killer. At this point she can't see that Rumi has embodied her doppelganger.
Because the film is told from Mima's perspective, we get confused as ordinary reality, nightmares, mirages and acting on the set follow each other seamlessly. One moment we are seeing Mima's ordinary life in her small messy room, and next moment we are seeing Yoko (Mima's character in the TV show) and next moment we are seeing a mental image and next moment we are seeing one of her dreams. They are indistinguishable because Kon doesn't provide clues to tell in which dimension we are.
The manic fan, Me-Mania, is a victim of his own fantasy. He is used by Rumi to terrorize Mima, and eventually gets killed by Rumi. It is clear that he tries to kill Mima, but then the scene of Mima killing him is actually a scene from the film in which Mima's character Yoko kills the security guard.
Note that Mima is continuously reminded of her singer self by a website
that has no mercy for her privacy.
On one hand there is the entertainment industry that simply wants to maximize
profits and does not hesitate to destroy her virginity. On the other hand
there is a fan base that worships her artistic virginity on the web.
She is both a product (of the industry) and an ideal (for the fans).
Both manipulates her to some extent and she correctly cannot decide which one
she really is.
Then there's the theme of brutality. All murders are brutal, but here
the real brutality happens during the rape, when not only is she attacked
by the audience but then the audience watches in delight as one man rapes her
on stage. The director stops the film so that we can hear the actors discuss
the scene and that alerts us that the rape is not a real rape, but nonetheless
the audience is depicted as a bunch of perverts. That's us, who are watching
the film.
A female dance-pop trio, the Cham, are performing in front of ecstatic fans.
There are also four notorious troublemakers, making fun of the performance in
the back of the venue, and one tall fan who is transfixed staring at the main
singer, Mima. A flashback (or flashforward) shows
Mima on the subway and listening to her own song while staring at her own reflection in the window. We also sees her shopping at the supermarket.
Back to the show, the four thugs, as expected, cause some commotion and the tall
fan gets into a fight with them. Meanwhile, Mima announces that this is her
last performance as a singer: she has decided to quit the group and start a
new career as a television actress.
While they perform, we see flashbacks to the meeting during which her agents
Rumi and her boss Tadokoro convinced her to become an actress instead of a singer because
singers don't make enough money. In the background we see a video of Mima the
singer crying on the bed and being consoled by Mima herself.
Mima is actually an ordinary girl, who shops at the supermarket and lives alone
in a small apartment. She receives an anonymous love letter that surprises her.
She is not happy with the decision to abandon her singing career.
Her mom calls to check on her and she too is surprised that Mima abandons
the singing career. Then someone else calls but Mima only hears
someone breathing. Then she receives a fax that accuses her of betraying her
fans. The camera shows us her apartment from across the street, implying that
someone is spying on her.
Filming begins.
Eri is a famous television star and the protagonist of a new television series
titled "Double Bind".
Eri plays a psychologist Touko who collaborates with a male inspector who
investigates a series of murders.
Mima has only one line in the episode but she is very nervous.
A letter is delivered that is address to her but it explodes in the hands of
Tadokoro before he can deliver it to her.
Tadokoro is only mildly injured and Rumi belittles it as "a prank".
The studio decides not to have a police investigation of the letter bomb
because nobody got hurt seriously.
Mima's agent Rumi, also her best friend, is not happy with Mima's new career.
Rumi used to be a pop idol herself.
Rumi helps Mima set up a computer and Internet connection at home.
Mima can now browse the web and checks a website that is about her,
titled "Mima's Room".
She is shocked to find out that someone knows everything about her. That website
is basically a very detailed diary of her life.
The shooting of the television serial continues. It is about a serial killer.
Mima only gets a few lines in each episode.
The producer demands more from the scriptwriter and the scriptwriter delivers
a script in which Mima is a stripper and gets rape in front of the audience.
Mima accepts to do it, despite
Rumi's warning that it could ruin her reputation with her old fan base.
Scantily dressed, she dances in front of an ecstatic
audience of perverts who then try to grab her. One man prevails and rapes
her on stage while the audience cheers.
At home she reads about her "betrayal" on the website. In fact, she sees
herself on the screen, her previous singer self, shaming her for ruining
her reputation (which is what Rumi thinks of the situation). This is when
Mima begins to see her old self, the pop singer, her alter-ego, claiming
that she (the alter) is the real Mima while she (the real) is an impostor.
We see that Me-Mania is the one writing on Mima's Room, but only Rumi can possibly know so much about Mima.
The screenwriter is stabbed to death in the elevator.
Mima's new career turn consists in posing naked for a famous photographer.
Her old fans cannot believe her transformation as they look at the pictures
in tabloids.
Mima sees again her old self, the pop singer, mocking her while she, the
actress Mima, defends her decision to become an actress: she is clearly
torn between her old and new self.
The tall fan, Me-Mania, receives an email from Mima claiming
that the sexy Mima is an impostor.
We see the singer Mima in her white dress (in fact many Mimas) in Me-Mania's room begging him to get rid of the impostor Mima for her, and Me-Mania promises.
On the set Mima's character is confessing to Eri's character Touko the doctor that
she is losing her mind. She gets distracted when she sees Me-Mania in the
audience and makes a mistake. The director shouts "Cut!" and Mima apologizes
for her mistake. Me-Mania has disappeared (or was never there).
It starts raining and they have to stop shooting.
Tadokoro takes her to see her old partners in Cham who are doing a radio
show to celebrate their first hit single (therefore they are more successful
now without Mima) and Mima sees her old self in the white dress sitting between them.
The singer Mima hops away and Mima runs after her through the hallways
and stairwells of the building. The illusion tells her "I'm the real Mima".
The chase continues in the street despite heavy rain.
Mima almost gets run over by a truck driven by Me-Mania,
but... that's when she wakes up in her messy room.
Rumi comes to visit her.
She tells Rumi that her personality is split and it turns out
that's precisely the line she has to recite on the set to Eri's
character Touko, but she makes the mistake of saying "Rumi" and the
director shouts "Cut!"
Mima is terrified to see Me-Mania staring at her but he soon
disappears.
Another take... and we are in the messy room and she's listening to the news.
Rumi visits her again and Mima doesn't remember that Rumi visited her the day
before (or, at least, that's what Rumi says that she did).
We don't know what is dream, what is mirage and what is real anymore.
Mima breaks an object and her hands bleed.
On the set Eri's character Touko tells her male partner that Mima's character Yoko
is afraid of a security guard (Me-Mania) and thinks that he is the
serial murderer of top models.
She tells inspector Yamashiro to find her quickly.
A pizza-delivery boy, presumably wearing a mask, kills the photographer, responsible for her transformation from virgineal singer to sexy actress and model.
As he stabs the photographer, the image turns into Mima stabbing someone to
death while seeing images of the photographer taking pictures of naked Mima,
and then... we hear the director shout "Take 3!"
And she wakes up in her messy room. She stares at her hands that have no
wounds: it was all a bad dream.
Except that the phone rings: Takadoro informs her that the photographer
has been murdered and she is shocked (if she killed him, she doesn't remember
anything, but most likely it wasn't her to killed him - the murder took place
while she was coincidentally dreaming of the photographer).
She puts down the phone and... she finds bloody clothes in
her room (only two people could have put them there: either she herself or
her best friend Rumi).
Back on the set, the crew shoots the scene of a murder: she is standing in
front of the man she just killed. She faints and... she wakes up again in her
messy room. But then she is in a room with the psychologist, telling the
psychologist that she is Mima the actress. The men who are watching the
conversation remark that she believes she is an actress called Mima, as if they
now that she is not. Now it is not clear if this is the film that they are
shooting or the reality in which the real Mima is being examined by a
psychologist. Eri's character Touko walks out of the room and diagnoses
"dissociative identity disorder": the real person is Yoko who thinks she was
raped in a strip club and assumed the
persona of an actress called Mima and killed a lot of people, and then
assumed the persona of her sister Rika, a top model.
The director shouts "Cut!"
The filming of "Double Bind" ends. The crew claps and cheers.
Mima is however confused as she walks away surrounded by people who clap their hands.
Rumi and Tadokoro congratulate Mima.
When she meets Eri, she calls her "doctor" like in the movie that they just
ended shooting.
While she is alone in a hallway, the tall fan Me-Mania grabs her and tries to rape her accusing her of being an impostor, not the real Mima.
He tells her that the real Mima emails him every day and confesses that he has
killed the screenwriter and the photographer and now is going to kill her too.
She hits him in the head with a hammer, and he falls unconscious (but unlikely
to be dead).
She freezes and... it's again the ending of the
filming: the crew claps and cheers again.
Is she just remembering what just happened?
Rumi is looking for her in the hallway and
finds her wounded and scared... but there is no dead body of Me-Mania.
Rumi drivers her back home... to Mima's room.
Mima finds herself in a new room, a nice tidy room completely different
from the messy room that we have seen so far.
Rumi is not there.
She tries to call Tadokoro: he doesn't pick up and we see that he
is dead in a room with the equally dead Me-Mania.
She opens the blinds and looks outside the window and mutters "This is not my room".
Her doppelganger, Mima the singer, appears behind her and tells her "Of course not: this is Mima's room", implying again that Mima is actress is an impostor.
Mima the singer is wearing a new red costume and her face turns into... Rumi!
Rumi confesses that she knows Me-Mania and implies that she used him to kill.
Then Rumi pulls out a paper cutter and tries to kill her. Mima runs out on the
balcony, falls down, but is not injured, and starts running in the street,
screaming for help, always chased by her Rumi in the red dress that morphs
into her old singing self.
And then in the fight... Rumi gets wounded.
Rumi stumbles into the middle of the street while a truck is coming.
She, morphed again into Mima the singer, is about to be run over when Mima jumps and pushes her away.
In the last scene Rumi is a quiet patient in a mental hospital. Mima comes
to check on her. Nurses wonder whether she's the famous actress Mima: she
has become a star, and seems to be in full command of herself, to
have accepted her actress self.
Mima cannot hear the nurses wonder whether she is the famous Mima
them but, after she
gets into the car, she looks into the mirror and says "No, i'm real".
Who is she talking to?
Sennen Joyu/ Millennium Actress (2001), scripted by Sadayuki Murai.
is a postmodernist puzzle in which the story follows a Moebius strip, repeating itself and chasing itself endlessly while spanning many historical eras and different stages in the life of the protagonist.
Flashbacks about the protagonist's past are mixed with scenes from some of her famous films, and it all seems to be fabricated by the journalist who interviews her. In fact, the journalist appears as a character in several of these stories. It feels like it's him daydreaming about her while she is telling the story of her life.
Each film repeats her love story in a different era.
The journalist keeps becoming part of the films and of the flashback and in fact he is the one who has found the key which is the mover of the whole film.
Fiction keeps intruding in reality.
Whenever we feel that we are seeing real life, Kon shows us that it is the set of a film.
The film is also a metaphor for the curse of all actors forced by the industry to repeat always the same role.
These actors become their role. It is not clear whether old Chiyoko is telling the story of her life or simply repeating the role she has played all her life in all those movies.
This is also a fairy tale about eternal love, or, better, the search for eternal love.
The narrative structure confounds film and flashback, or, better, hints that they are the same: making the film, watching the film and telling the story of the film are the same.
There is of course another story of eternal love besides the woman's: the journalists who interviews her has constantly loved her, and kept her key all those years for the same reason that she was keeping it: as a symbol of eternal love.
A female astronaut is embarking on a dangerous space trip, arguing that she promised to someone to find him. Just then an earthquake strikes. We are suddenly in the room of a man, Genya, during the earthquake. He was watching the movie of the astronaut. He rewinds it and we see flashing by some of the scenes that we will see in the rest of the film.
The film begins in earnest with bulldozers destroying cinema studios.
A TV reporter, Genya, and his cameraman, Kyoji, document the end of the
legendary studios. They decide to trek to the place where a reclusive
70-year-old actress, Chiyoko, has retired to shoot a documentary about her.
She welcomes them. Genya is clearly moved seeing again the idol of his youth.
He has a gift for her: a key that she lost. She is touched because that key
opens the most important thing in the world.
She begins her recollection of how she got the key and we see the flashback to her childhood. Genya and the cameraman are suddenly inside her flashback, filming what she narrates.
She was a teenager when Japan invaded China. An official wanted her to play in a patriotic film but her mother objected that it was not proper for a girl.
(Genya and the cameraman are physically in the same frame that Chiyoko is narrating with young Chiyoko and her mother).
On a winter day, she accidentally ran into a bleeding young man who was running away,
chased by the police. He was carrying a portrait. She sent the police in the
opposite direction.
She then took the young man, an artist and pacifist, to her home, where he hid for a while.
She followed him in the snowy landscape when he was painting.
Genya and the cameraman are in the scenes and Genya comments on what is happening, and the cameraman, who is younger, makes jokes.
One day she found blood on the snow and the artist's key, and ran home to find the house surrounded by police. Luckily her father helped the artist escape to the train station. She ran to the train station (followed by the panting Genya and the cameraman who never stops filming) but she arrived too late and dropped on the floor in the snow.
Genya cries and tells the cameraman that he always cries when he sees that scene in her movie (so we are informed that we are watching scenes from her films, besides flashbacks from her youth).
She swore to follow him and return the key to him. By accident, his destination was Manchuria, the same place where the studio director had asked Chiyoko to play in a patriotic film.
Against the will of her mother, teenager Chiyoko accepted to play in the film
and was introduced to the star of the movie, the older actress Eiko.
On the ship to Manchuria she met young Otaki, the nephew of the studio director.
She tells Otaki that she is looking for a man but has to confess that she doesn't even know his name.
We see a scene of Eiko mocking Chiyoko's quest for the nameless man but it turns out to be a scene of the movie that they are making with the crew of filmmakers.
Desperate to find clues about the artist, Chiyoko followed Eiko's advice and visited a fortune teller who gave her a clue but also cursed her. Genya and the cameraman follow her in every scene, standing behind her and sometimes even next to her.
She took the train and Genya and the cameraman take the train with her.
Bandits attack the train and Genya helps her escape from the train, with Genya's cameraman filming the scene, so now Genya has become part of her flashback.
Genya and the cameraman, who basically come from the future, are scared of the bandits and fear for their lives (just like a movie's spectator may feel scared watching a realistic scene). She runs away through the train wreck... and ages. She is now an older actress, playing a lady whose lord has been killed in their medieval castle, and she is ready to kill herself with a sword.
The Eiko-recommended fortune teller appears again, offering her a potion to reunite with her lord, but also cursing her to one thousand years of loveless search for love, the fire of eternal love.
The fortune teller is blown away by a strong wind while fire rages around Chiyoko.
Chiyoko is about to be burned in the fire of the castle but Genya appears, now
impersonating a faithful servant, Nagato, with the cameraman filming the two.
Genya, who is now part of the film/flashback saves her and they ride away on horses, always filmed by Genya's cameraman.
Back to the present, Genya and the cameraman are interviewing old Chiyoko who narrates how she became a famous actress. The flashback resumes with another film set in another era, way back in the historical past. She is now a ferocious warrior, fighting the gang of an evil Eiko, assisted again by Genya/Nagato.
Nonetheless she is captured by the evil lady played by Eiko and then the fortune teller appears again, cursing her again to one thousand years of vain search for love.
It is now a realistic film set in the samurai era. Soldiers are looking for an escaped samurai and she sends them in the wrong direction.
Genya/Nagato is her servant and savior also in this film: he shows up with a gun. Comically, his cameraman reminds him that he is playing a character in the wrong era (the gun in a samurai movie?!?)
She rides away on a horse and... suddenly we are in the early 20th century and she is riding a rickshaw carried by Genya. Then she rides a bicycle through the countryside until stopped by soldiers and arrested for helping a criminal.
Chiyoko meets Eiko in jail, who mocks Chiyoko's loyalty to her love dream: Eiko
was robbed by her lover and is cynical about men.
Genya watches from outside the jail and cries. Then he becomes
the rickshaw man again and buys Chiyoko's release with a ton of money.
While she is being released, her man is taken into the same jail and she knocks
in vain at the door. And then suddenly she is alone in a destroyed city during World War II.
She is alone in the ruins (if you don't count Genya and the cameraman who are watching her). As she walks around, she finds a portrait of herself, a portrait made by the artist, and she faints.
She wakes up in post-war Japan, with Western tourists around.
She is an adult and has become a movie star.
Eiko is more envious than ever of her.
There's an admirer on the set: young Genya.
Otaki, now a rich and handsome director, tries to kiss Chiyoko, but she is still in love with her artist, still loyal to her mission to return the key.
Genya (as the journalist) watches the scene jealous and is ready to punch the director in the face.
Her aging mother convinces her to marry the director. Her mother reminds her that all political prisoners have been released, and still there is no sign of this artist. It is pointless to keep hoping. This scene seems to be a real flashback of real life, but instead we are shown that it is the set of a movie.
During the break Chiyoko realizes that she has lost the key, and asks everybody to help her find it. Maybe Eiko stole it. She moves on to play the teacher in another movie and cries in front of her children telling the story of her love (and we see Genya and the cameraman among the children). We return to the present where old Chiyoko is crying in front of Genya and the cameraman.
She recovers and tells them that she married Otaki. We are now in 1969, the TV set is showing the mission to the Moon. She is cleaning a room and accidentally finds the key. Otaki had it. Eiko appears confessing how much she always hated Chiyoko, and playing the wrongly accused thief. But then we see that this is, again, just the set of a film.
A cripple, a war veteran, comes to deliver a package to Chiyoko from the artists/dissident, and gets on his knees apologizing to her: he represents all the soldiers who blindly followed authorities. It's a letter in which the artist thanked her for her help.
Chiyoko runs out in the rain holding the key and jumps into a taxi.
Then she runs to the train station and catches the train to the countryside.
We see scenes of the previous stories in which she was running, running, running; and sees in which she was banging at closed doors, always unable to find her love.
The train stops for an accident. She jumps out and starts running in the countryside, haunted by the ghost of the fortune teller.
She is almost run over by a truck that stops to give her a ride... the driver is Genya! The truck becomes a bus advancing in the snowy landscape.
She leaves the bus and walks in the snow towards the place where the painter
used to paint, hoping that is there waiting for her.
The scene changes to the Moon, the first scene, where she plays the astronaut,
determined to find her love wherever he went. She finds his painting of the
snowy landscape that has the painter himself in the landscape. But the painter
waves goodbye and disappears from the painting. She cries. Genya and the cameraman are watching, they too dressed as astronauts.
Then she boards the rocket, determined to follow her love, with Genya begging her not to. The rocket is about to take off like in the first scene when... a strong earthquake strikes and we see that we are on the set of a movie.
The set is collapsing and Genya saves her.
Genya finds the key and keeps it as a memory.
Back to the present, old Chiyoko stares at the portrait of herself that she found among the ruins, and she confesses that she stopped searching, because after all she didn't want the painter to see her as an old woman.
An earthquake strikes again. Genya jumps and saves her again. She is taken to
the hospital, while we see that the old studios are being demolished.
Genya and the cameraman start driving back home. Now we see Genya's flashback
who narrates how the cripple war veteran confessed to him that the artist had
been tortured and killed. Genya never told Chiyoko.
Back to the hospital, they are told that Chiyoko is dying.
She confesses to Genya that the search for her artist was more important than finding him, and that she is searching, and she again has the key.
She will be looking for love even in death, which makes Genya cry.
Now we return to the astronaut: the space rocket leaves the Moon.
Tokyo Goddofazazu/ Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is a more traditional melodrama and comedy.
It is Christmas Eve and it is snowing.
Gin, a drunkard, Hana, a drag queen, and Miyuki, a young runaway, are
three homeless people.
While in line to get food from a charity,
Hana wonders if a miracle could allow her to have a baby.
They search a dump for anything valuable and find... an abandoned baby in a bag.
Hana interprets it as a miracle and names it Kiyoko.
Gin looks in the bag and finds the keys to a locker.
Gin wants to call the police but instead Hana wants to take care of the baby,
the rare opportunity to feel like a mother.
Gin agrees to keep the baby for just one night.
Gin tells Hana that he was married but his wife and his daughter died.
It snows the whole night.
When Gin and Miyuki wake up, they see that Hana has run away with the baby.
However, it's easier to follow her footprints in the snow.
They find Hana sitting in the snow.
They tell them that she never saw her parents and grew up in foster homes,
and doesn't want the baby to suffer the same fate.
Hana's solution is to find the mother.
They start by finding and opening the locker. Inside they find
a photo of the parents, keys to an apartment and business cards of a nightclub.
They take a train to the nightclub but the train breaks down in the snow.
While they are waiting for the train to be repaired, a passenger recognizes
Miyuki (presumably her father) and frantically makes a phone call.
Miyuki jumps from a window of the train and the others follow her.
They walk a long way until they reach a cemetery.
On the road they meet a man trapped under his own car. They helped him out
and he explains that he forgot to pull the handbrake. He thanks them and they
ask for a ride to their destination. He happens to know the nightclub very
well. In fact, his daughter is getting married with the owner that very
day, and the owner is a gangster. He invites them to the wedding party,
where Gin recognizes the groom as the man who ruined him while Hana is
asking the same man where to find the girl in the photo. The girl is
Sachiko an entertainer. Just when Gin is about to take his revenge on
the gangster, a black maid shoots him. The black maid, who removes the wig
to reveal a young man, takes Miyuki and the baby as hostages.
Hana and Gin see the black man, Hana and the baby take a taxi and Hana
takes down the number of the taxi. Gin refuses to continue the search because
he is not an action hero. Hana continues alone.
The trio are now separated. Gin gets drunk and stumbles into a dying old man
who gives him a small bag.
Miyuki is taken by the kidnapper to his wife, who has a baby of her own,
and the two women become friends, with
Miyuki explaining that she ran away after stabbing her father, a policeman.
And Hana, searching for Miyuki and the baby, tracks down the taxi driver
and asks the driver to drive to the same address.
Hana finds Miyuki and they leave together. Hana takes
Miyuki and the baby to her mother's club, where Hana used to perform as a singer
before hitting a customer.
They are surprised to find Gin there: he was beated by a group of kids and then
helped by Hana's mother.
The trio can finally resume their journey to Sachiko's home.
But when they reach the address they discover that the home has been demolished.
Gossiping neighbors tell them that Sachiko worked as an entertainer
to pay her husband's gambling debts. Gin, crying, confesses that he too was
abandoned by his wife for gambling and drinking.
Miyuki sees a message in the newspaper from her father who begs her to come back home, but she can't find the strength to do it.
When the trio is ejected from a store where they were sheltering from the snow,
an ambulance crashes into the store. Hana interprets it as another sign that
the baby is sent by God, but then she collapses. They have to take her to
the hospital.
There Gin recognizes one of the nurses: she's his daughter, also named Kiyoko.
The girl is happy to see her father again and informs him that she is marrying
an older doctor. Hana is furious that Gin lied
to them all the time pretending that his wife and daughter had died, and
leaves with the baby, followed by Miyuki.
Gin is sitting alone in front of a TV set at the hospital when
the TV announces the winning lottery ticket and that a baby was stolen from
the hospital.
Meanwhile, Hana and
Miyuki save a woman who is about to jump from a bridge: she is Sachiko,
desperate that she lost her baby.
Sachiko tells them that her husband stole the baby from her.
Hana has accomplished her mission: she found the mother. And therefore she hands Sachiko the baby.
However, Gin finds Sachiko's husband, who tells him that Sachiko stole the baby
from the hospital: it is not her baby.
Gin finds Hana and Miyuki and tells them that they just helped the thief.
The trio chases Sachiko, who runs away by stealing a truck. Gin used to be
a biking champion: he jumps on a bike and chases them. Hana flags down a car
and forces the driver to chase the truck. When the truck crashes, Sachiko
runs into a building and takes the elevator to the top. She walks into
the snowy roof, ready to jump with the baby.
Miyuki reaches her and talks to her. Sachiko confesses that she stole the baby
after a miscarriage, but refuses to surrender the baby.
A helicopter is broadcasting the scene live on television.
Miyuki grabs her when Sachiko jumps with the baby, but Sachiko loses the baby.
Just then Hana reaches them and jumps to save the baby.
A miracle saves Hana and the baby, that land safely on the ground.
Hana and Gin ends up at the hospital. Miyuki hands gin his pack of cigarettes
and nobody notices that a lottery ticket fall to the floor: it's the winning
lottery ticket, worth a fortune.
The baby has been reunited to the real parents, and a policeman escorts them
to visit the trio at the hospital: the policeman turns out to be
Miyuki's father. We are not told if Gin will ever realize that he owns
the winning lottery ticket.
He also designed and directed the TV series
Moso Dairinin/ Paranoia Agent (2004).
Papurika/ Paprika (2006), adapted from Yasutaka Tsutsui's sci-fi novel,
is a colossal chaotic postmodernist thriller with philosophical overtones.
It blurs the border between dream and reality not only by mixing it in the
plot but also by scorning it through deliberate quantum jumps from one
world to the other and sometimes within one degree of imagination to another
one, with characters who enter and leave films, television broadcasts
and even posters.
The
putable protagonist would be the detective who has to solve the case,
but he is only interested in psychoanalyzing himself and will succeed at that.
The real protagonists are two heroines who are the same woman, and who
save the world from the chaos of an alternative irrational world of dreams.
They save reality from collapsing into the unreal.
The weakest part is the ending, worthy of the most moronic Hollywood
romances and melodramas.
An ordinary man is dragged into a circus and tricked into a cage by
a friend.
A mob chases him, all of them looking like him,
The nightmare ends with a murder that the man witnesses powerless to prevent.
This is a dream, dreamed by a detective, who is
lying on a bed. He wakes up and finds the girl who was with him in the circus.
She is a psychotherapist who is using an experimental device, DC-mini, to
capture people's dreams and store them on a computer memory.
They analyze the dream on the computer. He has been obsessed with finding
the murderer.
Before leaving his apartment, she hands him a business card with the name
of a website. Her name is Paprika.
An older woman, dressed professionally, finds a fat
man blocking the elevator that she has to take to reach her office.
The fat man tells her frantically that the DC-mini has been stolen.
It turns out he is the (unlikely) inventor of the device and they both work
in for distinguished psychiatric institution.
The woman, Atsuko Chiba, immediately calls her boss, an older scientist,
Shima,
and informs him that the thief can now steal dreams from their patients.
Chiba, the fat boy, named Tokita, and their old chief Shima report the fact to the
chairman of the company, who deeply regrets the invention.
He has his own informer and has learned that the thief is a girl named Paprika
ho uses the still experimental device to perform unathorized therapy.
Suddenly the old scientist gives a delirious speech and jumps from the window,
almost killing himself: dreams of his patients have been injected into his
mind and are causing him to go berserk.
Meanwhile, a parade of kitchen appliances, stuffed animals and geisha dolls,
all of them turned into jovial cartoons, is advancing through a forest towards
the city.
China and Tokita find
find his patients' dreams on Shima's computer.
They recognize someone from the office into the scientist's dream: their
colleague Himuro. Himuro becomes a prime suspect in the case.
Tokia, Chiba and a young colleague break into Himuro's place and find
hundreds of geisha dolls and a door that opens into a deserted amusement park.
She walks outside and...
she almost jumps from a balcony. It was a nightmare, implanted into her
subconscious by the same evil mond.
Meanwhile, the chief Shima has joined the parade of objects marching through
the forest. He sits on top of a big carnival-like truck, surrounded by all sorts
of surreal figures. Paprika enters his dream as a little girl and manages to
(literally) explode it.
The detective calls the old chief Shima to thank him for having let Chiba
use the device on him: Chiba and Paprika are the same person, although they
look and behave very different.
Chiba is cold, brainy, and professional;
Paprika is lively, casual, and carefree.
Meanwhile, Chiba is walking home and she sees her avatar Paprika reflected in
a glass wall and talks to her, confessing that she (Chiba) hasn't had a dream of
her own in a while.
The detective enters the website recommended by Paprika:
he finds himself in a bar, attended by two bartenders. Paprika explains that
this is her meeting place,
where she counsels her customers. The
detective explains that he and Shima have been friends since college.
Two more doctors of the institution go crazy. The chairman bans any use of the
device.
Tokita takes Chiba to a theme park that he showed to Himuro: the one that
she experienced in her nightmare.
Paprika warns her just in time to save her life:
Himuro falls from the sky. He tried to commit suicide.
Shima invites the detective to help them investigate the case.
The detective meets Chiba and seems immediately fascinated by her frigid attitude.
Instead she is hostile to him.
On the way home, the detective's mind is hijacked.
Chiba decides to disobey the chairman and use the DC-mini to enter Himuro's
dream.
Chiba loses her patience with Tokita, who doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity
of the situation and the fact that there must be someone behind Himuro's actions.
The detective's dream plunges again into the circus dream:
he is back in the cage, surrounded by zombie like creatures.
He sinks into an elevator where a girl takes him to Tarzan's floor, to
film noir's floor, and eventually
back to the scene of the murder that has been haunting him for years.
Paprika is watching this as a movie in a theater and she is clapping amused.
The detective finds himself with a smoking gun in his hand,
and the person on the floor is himself: he has just killed himself.
Paprika is even more amused, eating popcorn in the movie theater, the only
person in the audience.
Feeling bad after the altercation with Chiba,
Tokita uses the forbidden device to enter Himuro's dreams and is catapulted
into the mad parade as a robot.
The detective surfaces in the movie theater with Paprika, watching the movie
of his own dream.
The mad parade invades the theater: all dreams are merging.
Paprika recognizes Tokita, now a toy in the parade euphorically following the
crowd of objects, and she tries in vain to stop him.
Paprika from the dream calls Shima and tells him that all dreams are merging.
In the laboratory (real life) Shima and Achiba have found Tokita
and Himuro, who are in a suspended state similar to coma.
To save Tokita, Chiba dives as Paprika into Tokita's dream and keeps
communicating with Shima.
The parade has entered the metropolis.
Paprika breaks through a glass wall in a deserted street and finds
a dilapidated warehouse and enters a mysterious world as a
flying Peter Pan.
She finds a giant corpse of Himuro and realizes that Himuro is
is just a victim, not the perpetrator: the real
culprit is a collective dream, but whose delusion is it?
She is about to get captured by a monster with many octopus-like tentacles
that is finally revealed to be none other than the
chairman himself: he is protecting the sanctity of dreaming from the dreadful
device that his scientists have invented.
Chiba/Paprika realizes that she is still inside a dream and Shima tries to
wake her up while the chairman is having fun chasing her from dream to dream
in increasingly wild scenarios, basically showing her the power of dreams and
why they should not be desecrated.
The yound scientist, Osanai, captures her: it turns out that he has been working
for the chairman's obscure conspiracy all along. At the same time
Osanai admits his love for Chiba,
The detective is getting drunk at the bar of Paprika's website.
When midnight strikes, he realizes that the new day is number 17 and is
shaken by panic. He confesses to the bartenders that he made a film when he
was a teenager in which he was chasing another guy. He was jealous of the
other guy, a guy more popular than him. Then the guy died and the film was
left unfinished.
The detective walks out of the bar and finds big posters pasted on the walls
of the street advertising a movie titled "Paprika".
He walks inside a movie theater and sees Paprika being harassed by Osanai on
screen.
Osanai is pushing his hand inside her vagina and up her body until he splits
her face and inside Paprika he finds the frigid body of Chiba.
The chairman rises from Osanai's neck to demand that the girl be killed, but
Osanai cannot obey because he is in love. The two man fight each other.
The detective breaks through the screen of the movie theater and enters the
room where this fight is taking place. He rescues the naked Chiba while the
two-headed monster (part Osanai and part chairman) struggles within itself.
At last, Osanai runs away, the detective chases him into a corridor,
and that is the scene of the murder. The
detective shoots Osanai in the corridor. Now we see that this was being
projected on the screen of the movie theater because the words
"The End" appear over the characters and the audience starts clapping.
In the laboratory Chiba wakes up panting and slaps Shima.
A wounded O walks in, and collapses to the floor... in the chairman's room...
and sinks into his floor... we are back in a dream...
but Osanai has been killed for real... by a bullet shot by the detective
inside his dream, which had become everybody's dream.
Tokia and Himuro are still asleep in a coma.
Shima tries to call the detective but a giant doll attacks the building,
cracking the glasses with her scream.
The mad parade is snaking its way through the streets of the city,
infecting all the passers-by.
The detective is watching incredulous.
The two bartenders are behind him and they invite him to follow them in
order to clean up the mess.
The parade is also invading the laboratory and Chiba too realizes that dream and
reality are merging.
Shima and Chiba are chased by the giant doll and Shima is almost killed,
saved at the last second by... Chiba and Paprika together. Paprika leaves them
with an enigmatic "explanation" for being present at the same time as Chiba
and jumps into a television set to become part of the live reportage.
Still chased by the giant doll, Chiba and Shima have no choice but to perform
the same feat: jump into the tv set. They all find themselves in the middle
of the parade. The giant doll follows them there and is about to finish Chiba
when it gets destroyed by rockets fired by the Tokita robot.
Chiba wants to save Tokita, whereas Paprika wants to stop the chairman.
The two argue viciously, with Paprika accusing Chiba of being arrogant
and delusional. Paprika enters a poster and rides away on the horse painted
on it. Chiba tries in vain to restore the Tokita robot to himself. In a
King Kong-style scene the giant robot grabs Chiba and swallows her.
But that causes the robot to dream, and it dreams the initial scene when
Chiba found Tokita stuck in the elevator. The giant robot collapses.
The scene now is apocalyptic: destruction everywhere.
Seconds later a new threat appears: the chairman has mutated into a giant
demon, taller than the skyscrapers. He gives a delirious speech in which
he announces a new era for the universe, enacted and ruled by him.
Paprika jumps into the lifeless robot and reemerges as a naked child.
The child swallows the demon and becomes a beautiful young woman.
The nightmare of nightmares is over.
Tokita wakes up, and loving Chiba is next to him.
Shima asks the detective about his neurosis. The detective has found out that
he became a detective to turn his teenage film into reality, and his dead friend
is not angry anymore that the film was never finished.
The detective reenters Paprika's website one more time.
Paprika has left a message for him: she congratulates him for catching
the perpetrator, she predicts that Chiba will
marry Tokita, and she
recommends a movie. The detective walks to the movie theater where
the movie is being shown.
Kon died in 2010 of cancer before completing Yume Miru.
|
