Millennium Actress (2001)
Updated: Jul 1
Satoshi Kon has an unfortunately short filmography - he died of pancreatic cancer at 46. I haven’t seen his TV work or Tokyo Godfathers, but Perfect Blue is a masterpiece. If you want a more in-depth discussion of his work, check out the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David for their series on him. But the work I have seen tells a story of how much more he could’ve done. This film premiered the first year of the Best Animated Feature Oscar and didn’t even get nominated.
In Millennium Actress, a legendary actress named Chiyoko agrees to her first interview in thirty years, and what follows is a memory film that refuses to stay inside the borders of memory. Her recollections bleed so completely into the roles she played that the film stops bothering to separate them - a genuine formal argument about how a life spent performing eventually swallows the performer whole. The through-line is her search for a boy: a political dissident she hid in a storehouse for one night when she was young, who left her a key and disappeared to Manchuria, and whom she spent the rest of her life and career chasing without ever catching. There are jealous co-stars, a manipulative husband, and a documentarian - the crux of the film’s entire structure - who has clearly loved her from a safe distance his whole life and is keeping one significant secret from her until she’s too close to dying for it to matter. The revelation that what she actually loved was the pursuit itself hammers you over the head, mostly because the film spent its entire runtime showing you exactly that without ever quite saying it.
At the beginning, I didn’t feel especially engaged. But by the halfway point, I’d really locked into what it was going for. The idea of memory as both unreliable and malleable is fascinating - one Kon revisits, from a different angle, in 2006’s Paprika. Paprika is less “romantic,” focused on dreams and the subconscious, and it’s also a crime procedural, whereas this is a fictionalized biopic presented as a fantastical memoir. That’s where the innovation really stands out.
Biopics are often rote: the subject has something that’s eaten at them their whole life, and through memory or interview or whatever framing device, their entire existence gets tied to that one moment or idea. That’s happening here too, but in such an interesting way that it doesn’t feel run-of-the-mill. The documentarian and his cameraman become active observers rather than listeners, fading in and out of Chiyoko’s memories, complete with references to classic Japanese cinema - Godzilla, and an incredible homage to Throne of Blood involving the cameraman.
What results is something breathtakingly unique: a journey through memory and yearning, and what defines a human life. As they say, it’s the journey, not the destination - especially since all of our destinations are technically the same place.
4 out of 5 Stars
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