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Millennium Actress (2001)

Posted By: Someonelse
SD / DVD IMDb
Millennium Actress (2001)

Millennium Actress (2001)
DVD9 | ISO | NTSC 16:9 | 01:26:21 | 7,72 Gb
Audio: 日本語 AC3 5.1/2.0 @ 448/192 Kbps | Subs: English, Français
Genre: Animation, Drama, Romance

Director: Satoshi Kon
Writers: Satoshi Kon, Sadayuki Murai
Stars: Miyoko Shôji, Shôzô Îzuka, Mami Koyama

A movie studio is being torn down. TV interviewer Genya Tachibana has tracked down its most famous star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, who has been a recluse since she left acting some 30 years ago. Tachibana delivers a key to her, and it causes her to reflect on her career; as she's telling the story, Tachibana and his long-suffering cameraman are drawn in. The key was given to her as a teenager by a painter and revolutionary that she helped to escape the police. She becomes an actress because it will make it possible to track him down, and she spends the next several decades acting out that search in various genres and eras.


Behold Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon's anime answer to Mulholland Drive. This radical work by the director of Perfect Blue mainlines into a cosmic crawlspace between reality and fantasy from which it never leaves. Kon's love for his animated diva is supreme and he plays her romantic saga for delirious world-weary sorrow. The genius of the film is infinite: the practically monochrome palette that slowly saturates color as the film moves forward in time; the meta-cinematic conceits Kon employs in order to have the film's male documentary filmmaker penetrate what is supposedly an older Japanese actress's recollection of her own past; and the countless rhetorical shifts that evoke the woman's projection of her romantic melodrama onto her art.

Millennium Actress (2001)

When a two-man documentary crew discovers the whereabouts of the reclusive Chiyoko Fujiwara, the legendary actress explains how her career in cinema ran parallel to her search for an elusive love. (The documentary filmmaker's invasion of Chiyoko's memory is dubious at first, but Kon soon reveals the man's own romantic involvement in the actress's life.) Despite her mother's conservative wishes, a young Chiyoko is handpicked for stardom by a movie studio that now lies in ruin. That fateful day, a mysterious young artist bumps into the girl while fleeing from a police officer with a hideous scar on his face. She falls in love with the boy but he disappears soon after meeting her, leaving behind only a mysterious key. For the rest of her life, she's left to search for this "human-rights agitator" whose name she doesn't even know.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Throughout much of her early career, Chiyoko performs with an older actress who doubles for Chiyoko's two female enemies: the mother who almost denied her a career in cinema and the witch who may or may not have damned her to 1,000 years in the throws of eternal love. While in Manchuria shooting a film, Chiyoko looks for her lover in order to give him his key. While on the set of a chamber drama, she discovers that her part also has her looking for a missing lover. During time off from production, she journeys through war-ravaged Manchuria in search of her human-rights activist. When her train is ravaged by bandits, she steps through one door and reemerges on the set of a lavish samurai epic that finds her trying to negotiate the arrows of Manchurian warlords. And Kon evokes these ravishing passages between Chiyoko's reality and on-set fantasies often with as little as a fabulous superimposition or a mere door opening and closing.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Earthquakes and wars are serendipitously spun into the film's many dual realities, and rubble is Kon's metaphor of choice. From the fierce Edo Period samurai epic to the final space odyssey Chiyoko shoots before retiring from the screen, Millennium Actress's many films-within-a-film give Chiyoko's never-ending search for love various historical, political and cultural contextualizations. Hers is very much a tale of perseverance, so maybe this sweeping perspective is Kon's way of celebrating the defiant Chiyoko's power over various manmade creations and destructions in the film. Because her ability to project her emotional trauma onto her roles is so strong, it's that much more difficult to distinguish between Chiyoko's reality and Kon's historical recreations.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Comparisons to Mulholland Drive aren't too far off, because Millenium Actress concerns itself with our love affair with women in movies (many of whom are unceremoniously forgotten when they become too old). Here's a love story that not only spans a lifetime but thousands of years of political upheavals. Kon offers several hints throughout the film that Chiyoko's millennium sentence may be hysterically self-imposed, which makes the film's cosmic to-the-moon sequence that much more powerful. Perhaps Chiyoko knew all along that she was chasing the shadow of a man, and as such the thrill she derives from the chase suggests she's experiencing love vicariously through her acting. Indeed, Millennium Actress is very much a love poem to cinema itself. And Kon's love for the medium, like Chiyoko's eternal search, has no boundaries.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Having watched Satoshi Kon's Paprika and Tokyo Godfathers, it's a no brainer that I would jump at the chance to watch Millennium Actress. And I wasn't disappointed, though if I would rate this movie amongst the others I've seen, then my preference will be in reverse chronological order, not that Millennium Actress is no good, but you do see the scaling of new heights in the newer works.

Millennium Actress (2001)

I'm quite amazed at how a single theme (at least to me) managed to weave itself into a compelling story, and one which paid homage to the history of Japan, and to Japanese films. The actress in the title refers to Chiyoko Fujiwara (voiced by three different actresses - Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama and Fumiko Orikasa), and chronicles the story of her career. As such, we get to see her in various characters and costumes, in different genres set in different eras, like the Samurai films, science fiction, romance dramas, and even monster movies. Now a senior citizen who has since retired from the limelight, she's being tracked down for an interview by Genya Tachibana (Shozo Izuka) and his cameraman Ida Kyoji (Masaya Onosaka), as she's the icon for a movie studio which is being torn down. But there's more to Genya's intentions of just speaking to her, and that secret in which he has will form the basic crux of the story.

Millennium Actress (2001)

To some, it might be groundhog day narrative style as events get repeated, although in different reel eras. It's about chasing after a loved one, one who has disappeared, and about your relentless pursuit, never to give up for that glimmer of hope, for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In many aspects, there's a lot of reel life imitating real, and the presentation style is definitely a notch in the direction of class, having interpolate Genya and Ida into the memories of Chiyoko as they learn first hand the events that she encounters, and relive those memories in the form of the movies she had starred in. In this manner of skillfully manipulating images and colour, the movie becomes layered in multiple fashion, and is quite innovative, rather than telling the story in a flat out chronological style.

Millennium Actress (2001)

The story nevertheless remains immensely touching, and bittersweet as well, particularly when a key secret is revealed, and you find yourself having to hold back that tear from coming out of your eye, especially when you have experienced a similar, relentless chase for something that you do not know what the outcome is. As always, the movie is richly animated with deep background details that you do not keep your eyes off the screen, and definitely deserves multiple re-watchings. Definitely highly recommended.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Special Features:
- The Making of Millennium Actress (40:41) ( in Japanese with optional English/French subtitles)
- Trailer (1:04)

All Credits goes to Original uploader.


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