Millennium Actress

The television that elevates a star when they are young and sexy is the same television that carves the boards for their coffin. A tribute programme is rarely devoted to someone still active. The figure shrinks to a square in a lower corner of the screen, seen in replay, preserved in archive footage. A succession of glamour shots of an irretrievably dulled crystal hardly serves as a certificate of vitality or inspires new roles. TV as a chapel of rest.

“Now I can die,” the singer Lena d’Água once wept, confronted with recordings of her youth. That fatalism ran its course; she has since made a powerful return to the stage, but that was not how film students Rogério Ribeiro Rogério and Sara Bernardes de Oliveira found her in 2014. Sleeping Beauty, a documentary short, does what television abdicates its responsibility to do: dissect the innards of “glory”, of the showbiz legend. It catches an icon in the half-light, isolated, chewed up by the star system, wrestling with backstage ghosts, swearing at the noise of a VHS tape.

Something similar happens, in a fictionalised world, in Millennium Actress. “Isn’t this supposed to be a documentary?” the camera operator wonders, bewildered by the reality of his subject: larger than life, in a state of fusion. Shouldn’t the documentary filmmaker rein in these delusions, make life fit a run-of-the-mill format, instead of encouraging delusions? Well, then it would not be a film by Satoshi Kon, the master of the psychological thriller in anime (as he will also demonstrate in Paprika). A surrealist weapon, in the service of subliminal terrorism, against the certainties of space and time. Memory, as we shall see, works under those very same conditions.

Perfect Blue, from 1997, was a bulletproof debut: so robust that it could do nothing but establish itself as one of the modern classics of animated cinema. This despite, or because of, its cruelty. A sadistic violence that seems to serve a didactic function, illustrating just how complicit the viewer is in it — like a Technicolor Haneke, sped up by a glucose spike. Among the most gratuitous moments, the occasional truth emerges about idolatry, about self-perception, about the fan’s complicity in the slavery of fame. Through cartoons, Satoshi Kon gives us these lessons like sweets; they reach the roof of the mouth and turn out to be shards of glass.

In Millennium Actress — his next offering, from 2001 — nothing is quite so jagged or bloodthirsty. Even as it extends several of the stylistic devices of Perfect Blue, once again treading the boundaries of fiction, delighting in inducing labyrinthitis. For the protagonist of Millennium Actress, unlike the
teenage idol in Perfect Blue, does not spend 80 minutes hostage to paranoia, psychosis and media vultures. Chiyoko Fujiwara, a retired star, is based on Setsuko Hara, known for her work with Yasujirō Ozu, but who retired shortly after Tokyo Story (1953). At 43, she chose seclusion. Like Hara, Chiyoko “hides away like a hermit”— this does not, however, mean that she accumulates bitterness. Hesitantly, she accepts the invitation to a retrospective guided by Genya, a fanatical documentary filmmaker who makes little effort to maintain an objective distance from his interviewee.

Chiyoko is at ease with the overlaps between cinema and real life; so is the documentary filmmaker. A faithful follower of the actress, he drags the sceptical cameraman along to embrace this unruly journey, with its reckless crossings between scripts performed in the studio and days lived from the heart. It is a clever device that Satoshi Kon sets up with co-screenwriter Sadayuki Murai, because they make their manipulation invisible. It seems benevolent, releasing viewers — those who arrive here traumatised by Perfect Blue — from their investigative duties. Distinguishing between the planes of existence, knowing which is which, is optional. But immersing oneself in Chiyoko’s stories is not.

A rare opportunity to identify a parallel between Satoshi Kon and another filmmaker, that is, one in which Kon is the one influenced rather than the model being copied (hello, Aronofsky). A symmetry emerges with The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), not so unlikely after all, given that Kon selected it as one of his 100 cinematic touchstones. Millennium Actress gradually reveals the consequences of two encounters Chiyoko has as a child: the first with cinema, as a budding actress; the second with a painter, a political dissident. In Víctor Erice’s first feature, a young Ana Torrent lets herself be abducted by Frankenstein (1931), brought by a travelling projectionist; later, she befriends a Republican soldier. Kon places his character in the Second Sino-Japanese War; Erice in the Spanish Civil War (almost contemporaneous conflicts).

More than that, Kon and Erice share the mist that clouds our reasoning, suspending disbelief and chronology. Someone leafs through a family album with no apparent logic, telling little stories that may have little credibility but win us over through the sheer power of fantasy. This is Millennium Actress looking at nostalgia for what it truly is: the final vortex, an abyss from which linear memory does not protect us. May the wisdom of age, then, come to our aid — and, above all, poetic licence.