illennium Actress opens with a young female astronaut heading into space, but just as her ship begins to launch it becomes clear that she's a movie actor, being watched by a devoted fan who mouths the lines along with the movie's actors. The astronaut is Chiyoko Fujiwara, once a media darling and the star of a now-defunct studio. Now in her 70s, she lives alone in a mountain retreat. The fan is chubby, middle-aged video journalist Genya Tachibana, who is about to track Chiyoko down and interview her, on the occasion of her studio's demolition. But when Genya and his cameraman arrive at Chiyoko's place and begin discussing her past, she literally walks into her own history, taking the initially baffled and nervous TV crew with her.
As a young girl, Chiyoko met a wounded political radical on the run from the police, and sheltered him briefly. When offered a part in a film, she accepts in order to go to Manchuria, where she believes the young man might have traveled. As Millennium Actress unfolds, in an increasingly dizzying and layered fashion, Chiyoko's film roles and her actual history blend into each another. Whether playing a feudal princess, an assassin, an astronaut or a World War II bombing victim, she's always chasing the man she's obsessed with, whose face she never saw. As she pieces together her past as a series of celluloid shadows, reality and fantasy merge into an indivisible blur of vivid, forceful images, much as they did in Perfect Blue, the first film by Millennium Actress writer/director Satoshi Kon.
Kon himself appears on the American DVD in a 40-minute making-of featurette, in which he talks in startlingly vague terms about the inspiration for and development of Millennium Actress, his second film. The images and subtext contain some interesting information about the real-world visual references and research that went into Actress, but Kon talks more about abstracts like "growth rings" than the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. The featurette and an American theatrical trailer are the only extras on this simple disc.
A joyous fantasy, exquisitely crafted
But Millennium Actress itself is far from simple. Like Perfect Blue, it puts viewers inside the mind of a woman with a questionable grip on reality, and overwhelms them with a barrage of tangled images that take conscious effort to sort through. But where Perfect Blue was a bloody, grim thriller, Millennium Actress is a joyous celebration of 1,000 years of Japanese history, 100 years of Japanese filmmaking tradition, and the concept of fantasy itself. It's not entirely clear whether Chiyoko is suffering from senile dementia or overwhelming escapism, but through Genya's awestruck reactions to the swirling, surreal tableaux around him, Kon urges viewers to embrace her point of view, which is both more dramatic than reality and more optimistic.
Visually, Millennium Actress looks a lot like Perfect Blue, which isn't particularly surprising, given the return of Perfect Blue art director Nobutaka Ike, and Kon's hands-on role in designing his own characters. But with its many virtuoso movie-within-a-movie sequences, Actress gives Kon a lot more room to play with color and image. Chiyoko looks flat in the space sequences, but the backgrounds and the overall design are beautiful, and in some of the earlier movie scenes Chiyoko herself looks amazing in her elaborate costumes and choreography. The film is a visual feast, and its rich, complicated story only makes it better. The one misstep is in Susumu Hirasawa's loud, insistent, wholly unsubtle music, which tends to overwhelm some scenes.
And most of Millennium Actress doesn't need insistent musical cues to get its message across. As Genya incorporates himself into Chiyoko's films, living out a fan's greatest fantasy, and Chiyoko herself rejoices in a career of doing what she loved most, Millennium Actress builds to a bittersweet ending that perfectly sums up the themes that Kon is gradually turning into a career: There's a fine line between subjective and objective reality, and an actor's life blurs that line into a gauzy haze. And whether a given individual finds the dim world in the middle of that haze to be terrifying or wonderful says everything about them that's worth knowing.
Dub fans take note: Dreamworks is treating Millennium Actress like any other foreign film, and is releasing it in the original Japanese with subtitles (English and French) only. There is no English-language soundtrack on this release.
— Tasha
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