Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

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Mr Sausage
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Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#1 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Apr 17, 2023 7:46 am

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#2 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Apr 23, 2023 11:35 am

I thought more people would have something to say about this one, or Kon in general.

I'm not in the mood to rewatch this, as I saw it within the last year and didn't like it. But I'll talk about what I remember. As an an exercise in structure, I have no doubt the movie is brilliant, as Kon's films tend to be in this area. But I was irritated by its manner. Not just because mega-stan intrudes on, and even usurps/retells, much of the actress' story, but because here is a woman who led a fantastically interesting life, moving through key moments in history and across a vibrant, changing industry, and yet the movie seems to feel the most important thing is her quest for true love with some guy she met as a kid. How stereotypically feminine. So I didn't care about the actress nor her trite motivations, and I was annoyed by superfan and his overheated mannerisms. I wish the film had really been about movies and history, or been more about memory, rather than making those things window-dressing to the more pressing matter of following some guy down the years like a besotted teenager. The whole thing felt immature. I guess you could argue that her own life story was as trite and melodramatic as the films she was in, so that there is no fantasy/reality divide, just successive levels of filmic fantasy. But that would make the movie cynical in a way I dislike, and, anyway, I didn't see much internal motivation for that.

Contrast to Tokyo Godfathers, where each character is treated as a complex and irreducible individual, even tho' their backgrounds are often melodramatic, and where their needs and motivations not only shift from scene to scene, but are often inexplicable or contrary. Or consider Perfect Blue and Paprika, where the characters are flatter, but stand in for ideas amidst a larger exploration of how fantasy, memory, and identity intersect and become incoherent. Which is all to say, the titular millenium actress is not an interesting person. She isn't rounded like the characters in Tokyo Godfathers, and her flatness isn't compensated for by the challenging thematic material of either Perfect Blue or Paprika.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#3 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 23, 2023 1:19 pm

I appreciate you sharing your specific impressions about what didn't work for you, because I don't recall approaching the film from that critical vantage point at all. I also saw it within the last year, but I'll give it another go hopefully within the next couple days and try to find a way to engage with that position.

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Murdoch
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Re: Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#4 Post by Murdoch » Sun Apr 23, 2023 8:06 pm

It's been about a year since I've seen the film as well (did you all watch it when it was on Amazon Prime like me?). I enjoyed its structure and animation but found the titular actress's story rather hollow. I didn't mind the superfan character, and actually found his commentary and excitement throughout the film a good way of livening up the actress's life story.

At first, I was surprised that it was a Kon film. I'd only seen Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent from his oeuvre before it, both violent crime thrillers, so it was quite the departure to watch a loving ode to the history of film. However, I saw "Magnetic Rose" (part of the Memories portmanteau which Kon wrote) some time around Millennium Actress, and it shows a similar exploration of nostalgia and romance.as MA, telling the story of a spacecraft that plays off the lost loved ones of those that board it à la Solaris. Upon reflection, there's an overarching theme spread across all four Kon works I've seen - the fragility of human emotions and our psyche and how we cope with failure and loss.

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Re: Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#5 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:31 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
Sun Apr 23, 2023 11:35 am
I was irritated by its manner. Not just because mega-stan intrudes on, and even usurps/retells, much of the actress' story, but because here is a woman who led a fantastically interesting life, moving through key moments in history and across a vibrant, changing industry, and yet the movie seems to feel the most important thing is her quest for true love with some guy she met as a kid. How stereotypically feminine. So I didn't care about the actress nor her trite motivations, and I was annoyed by superfan and his overheated mannerisms. I wish the film had really been about movies and history, or been more about memory, rather than making those things window-dressing to the more pressing matter of following some guy down the years like a besotted teenager. The whole thing felt immature. I guess you could argue that her own life story was as trite and melodramatic as the films she was in, so that there is no fantasy/reality divide, just successive levels of filmic fantasy. But that would make the movie cynical in a way I dislike, and, anyway, I didn't see much internal motivation for that.

Contrast to Tokyo Godfathers, where each character is treated as a complex and irreducible individual, even tho' their backgrounds are often melodramatic, and where their needs and motivations not only shift from scene to scene, but are often inexplicable or contrary. Or consider Perfect Blue and Paprika, where the characters are flatter, but stand in for ideas amidst a larger exploration of how fantasy, memory, and identity intersect and become incoherent. Which is all to say, the titular millenium actress is not an interesting person. She isn't rounded like the characters in Tokyo Godfathers, and her flatness isn't compensated for by the challenging thematic material of either Perfect Blue or Paprika.
I can sorta see where you're coming from, but you seem to be admitting to want the film to be something else, and I'm not sure I agree with the criticisms as inherently problematic to what the film is trying to achieve. Perhaps it is stereotypically feminine to shed meaning from all the window dressing of lonely life experience for that yearning for passionate love, but that device transcends gender. How many movies revolve around a lone male character who seeks fame and fortune and adventure, only to get older and wiser and realize that all that flare paled in comparison to the love that was right in front of them all along, or 'the one that got away'. I think the film is doing something interesting with both its narrative and formal structure: there's this sense of aesthetic and genre liberation, where this woman engages with all the ideas and feelings and experiences in the world to arrive at something intimate and more important than all the available "adventures" that become either superfluous in comparison, or symbolically inform the sensations she is impotent to realise due to impediments to literally go back and relive and reconnect to what's lost.

I definitely read how this film sees Chiyoko much different from you, especially with your contrast of a hollow character/life to other Kon films that involve us in more active engagement with these characters as they grow in real time. This is a quasi-flashback/greatest hits/observational narrative, and so it feels a bit like Citizen Kane's gleaning of depth and meaning with a hybrid of irony and sincerity. Of course we're going to feel the characters in Tokyo Godfathers are more complex, because we're accompanying them on a micro-focused journey as they develop their characters through encountering problems together in a condensed setting; and of course we're going to feel more immersed in Perfect Blue's overwhelming subjective surrogate experience. Chiyoko is being fantastically observed/observing herself across a sea of fleeting memories connected through a strand of loose connective tissue, like sand seeping out of the old woman's hand as she clutches on til the bitter end. So she's "not interesting" like Charles Foster Kane is not interesting because we never really know him, but what her and his various observable states stand for sewn together is evocative and symbolic of a familiar nostalgia most of us have when reflecting on refracted emotional connotation out of reach. There's a moment when the interviewer notices Chiyoko crying and suggests they take a break until tomorrow, but she swiftly shuts down this plan by stating in anguish, "tomorrow I won't remember," and later cries in both her flashback and real time about "not remembering his face." It's as if we're watching a woman fast-forward through her most significant memories and feelings and realise them before her time runs out... that context of private motivations eliding the development we crave is a good reason why the film exists as it does, and develops the character in an unconventual way from backstage. In my view, this hysterical, literal breaking-down from the fantasy/memory to reveal its influence as coming from the present emotions or purged tears negates the view that the film should've been about this woman's great life or that her life was hollow - the emotions are true.

The interviewer/cameraman interrupting the melodrama also seems deliberately perverse on Kon's part, an admission of how both memory or second-hand idolatry or art organically dramatizes a life because emotion is involved. But Kon isn't diminishing this natural process - otherwise, why would he devote his time and energy to such an art project himself? Murdoch said that Kon has spent his career examining "the fragility of human emotions and our psyche and how we cope with failure and loss" and I think this film falls on the celebratory side of this exploration, where in acknowledging the limitations of engagement with -and skewed influences of our relationship to- symbols, people, and events, we can accept that the emotions are valid in a vacuum and lean into the meaning therein. I realize that's not a great argument if you're looking for an informationally-layered and compacted character story or abstract commentary on 'ideas' like memory, but for me this falls in between those concrete options, which don't need to be (and perhaps can not authentically be) separate. It's about how interventions like memory breed emotions that both grant and deprive richness of intimately accessing tangible truth, experience, and connection. Movies are often inspired by feelings or ideas we've had but cannot go back and sit with completely, or to the degree we chase, so artists externalize them in some filtered form into the choreography, musical notes, the page, screen, etc. That's why this feels like the most 'honest' Kon film - he's not pretending to know the experience of psychosis, or the drama of the Godfathers, and so on or so forth (yes, I know that Kon knows he's not actually entering their experience, and that a work of art is not "dishonest" because one creates and enters these worlds without a self-reflexive meta-commentary each outing!) But he's telling a story fragmented through temporal, narrative, and psychological barriers, and then incorporates the artificial tools of the medium to fill in the gaps and enhance the honest emotions with alterations from our emotional and cognitive biases via genre and structural manipulation - which is at once joyously playful and desperately tragic in its attempts to repair and understand and grasp the 'irreparable, incomprehensible, and ungraspable' against the friction of fatalism. Kon is using the tools at his disposal to reflexively surrender what he cannot and can provide, which mirrors what we as remembering and storytelling vehicles cannot and can do as well, if not exactly formally than theoretically in spirit.

The title seems like a cheeky misdirect that also feeds into the themes - the vast scope of "millennium" expands us to everything, but only to bring us back to the sensation that all that matters is the surging emotion in front of us. The love is all-encompassing, the love is the millennia. The identity of a "millennium actress" is a robe used to experience all, but it's the person under the mask who matters. And yet, for each of us, we are the actor in our own movie, the experiencer of all, and for the stans in love with what this person represents for them, this identity is symbolic of the totality of life a human being is capable of experiencing for them. If someone wants that to equate with the spellbinding adventure of cinema sets, that's cool, but a confidential, often-monogamous love is a more common and quite powerful spellbinding adventure of its own. Perhaps that's cheesy, and perhaps that's not as interesting to some moviegoers, or trite or whatever, but it's an existential and emotional revelation that is true and relatable to so many people. I don't think it's exactly right to call one's motivations "trite" if they're honest, just because the filmmaker had enough respect to restrain himself from entering the totality of this person's richness, especially when the film grammar and themes signify that as a critical ingredient of the tone.

I do appreciate that this film is trying to have its cake and eat it too - taking the Citizen Kane approach of distanced curiosity and collecting pieces filling in value, but also functioning like a melodrama where the main character is the primary surrogate... I just think that the reflexive splicing of the medium's artificiality-mimicking-memory's organically emotional tint works under both umbrellas and helps forge them together to create something pretty special.

[To be fully transparent, despite the above argument, this may be the first time I've felt worse about a movie after analyzing its merits here. I'm not sure if this is still my favorite Kon, I'll have to revisit the rest of his work (which I plan on doing soon, thanks for igniting that motivation), but this is one of those films that I think is best experienced emotionally than engaged with on a level of intellectualization, and I found that process exhausting. Or maybe it's just not as great as I thought it was, or I'm just tired and felt guilty about voting for a film that won without writing about it, so forced myself into an exercise while in the wrong mood. Anyways, I'll try to come back to this in a few years without rereading this thread and maybe that'll rejuvenate my level of affection]

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

#6 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Apr 25, 2023 9:50 am

I must admit I have not rewatched Millennium Actresss for years precisely because I have been worried I will like it less if I rewatch it. That said, I should have time to watch this later this week -- and will try to do so.

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