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Millennium Actress

2001, Movie, PG, 87 mins

Millennium Actress: Review

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS | SENNEN JOYU
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Past and present, reality and fiction blend seamlessly into each other in Satoshi Kon's dream-like animated drama about a reclusive actress and the documentary filmmaker determined to find out why she abruptly abandoned her career 30 years earlier. Middle-aged Genya Tachibana (voice of Shozo Iizuka), who's been in the thrall of actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (voiced at different ages by Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama and Fumiko Orikasa) since he was a young man, has finally secured an interview with Chiyoko for a documentary about her career. Beautiful, unaffected and perpetually breathless with enthusiasm, Chiyoko began acting as a teenager in the 1940s and continued through the early 1970s, making family melodramas, Godzilla movies, war pictures, period films and even a 2001-style science fiction epic. Her face graced the covers of hundreds of magazines, until one day she stepped out of the limelight and never returned. Her house turns out to be nestled in the wooded hills behind the Ginei Studio lot, where she spent her career; Tachibana shoots some melancholy footage of its demolition on the way to the interview. White-haired, but still graceful and lovely, Chiyoko graciously accepts the gift Tachibana has brought her: a key she lost decades earlier while shooting her last film at Ginei. Prompted by the key's return, Chiyoko reminisces freely about her youthful shyness, disapproving mother, rivalry with slightly older actress Eiko Shimao (Syouko Tsuda), marriage to director Otaka and unrequited love for a revolutionary artist (Kohichi Yamadera) who disappeared during WWII. As she speaks, an odd thing happens: Tachibana and his cameraman (Hirotaka Suzuoki) find themselves participating in Chiyoko's memories of her life and films, and through the interlopers Chiyoko's secrets — and a couple of Tachibana's — are revealed. Are they unstuck in time as a result of drinking Chiyoko's home-brewed herbal tea? Could the earthquakes that shake the ground three times in one day be symptomatic of a rift in the time/space continuum, or is everything — including Tachibana's documentary — unfolding within Chiyoko's mind? Kon never clarifies, and it doesn't matter. His film is a lovely meditation on memory, movies and the almost magical power of images to fire the imagination and keep the hope of happiness and beauty alive in the face of real-life ugliness and despair. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.) leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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