Satoshi Kon follows a retired actress back through her life and her films, which turn out to be the same thing. It is fast, funny and finally more moving than we expected; its one flaw is that the man she chases is hardly there.
Chiyoko Fujiwara was the biggest star her studio ever had, and one day, at the height of it, she walked off the lot and was not seen again. Decades later Genya Tachibana (Shozo Iizuka), who makes documentaries and has adored her since he was a young man, turns up at her door with a cameraman and a small rusted key. She takes the key, she begins to talk, and within a minute the sitting room is gone. This is Satoshi Kon’s second feature, after Perfect Blue, and it is the better film: quicker, warmer, and built on one idea that it never lets go of. We recommend it, with a caveat about the hole in its middle.
The idea is that Chiyoko’s life and Chiyoko’s films are the same story, told once. As a schoolgirl in 1930s Tokyo she shelters a wounded painter wanted by the police, he leaves her the key and vanishes, and she takes a contract with the Ginei studio because it is shooting in Manchuria and he might be there. From then on she runs after him, and every time she runs the century changes. She is a princess fleeing a burning castle, a girl on a bicycle while a monster flattens the city, a woman strapped into a rocket. Tachibana and his cameraman Ida (Masaya Onosaka) stand at the edge of each scene, filming it, and sometimes get pulled in. The first time she fell from a horse and landed on a railway platform we laughed out loud with pleasure. By the tenth cut we had stopped seeing the joins, which is Satoshi Terauchi’s editing doing exactly what it should.
Hisao Shirai’s photography keeps every era distinct so that the cuts register. The pre-war house is lamplight and brown wood, the castle is black and orange, the studio lot is a flat wet grey, and the snow she runs through late on is so white the figures look drawn on paper. Susumu Hirasawa’s score does the rest. It is synthesiser and drum, a pulse like feet on a road under a wordless chorus, and it returns whenever she starts to run, so that after a while you feel the music in your chest before the picture has changed.
Three actresses voice her, and the handover happens inside scenes. Fumiko Orikasa plays the girl, breathless and stubborn; Mami Koyama the star, harder and more tired; Miyoko Shoji the old woman, amused at herself. We caught the join once. Iizuka gives Tachibana a large soft voice and a habit of weeping at his own memories, and the script, by Sadayuki Murai and Kon, lets him be ridiculous without making him a fool. Onosaka’s Ida asks the questions we were asking. Showko Tsuda’s Eiko Shimao, the studio’s established star, is the one person who tells Chiyoko a hard truth about what she is doing, and Masane Tsukayama’s scarred policeman, who turns up in every century with the same face and the same grudge, supplies the film’s small steady dread.
The hole is the painter. He is a silhouette, a voice, a hand passing a key, and Murai and Kon plainly want him that way: they want us to care about her running, not about him. But 87 minutes is a long time to care about a blank, and around the hour mark, when the film has run and cut and run again a few more times than it needs to, we noticed we were counting. Tachibana’s gushing wears thin in the same stretch. Most critics have not minded; we did, a little.
Kon used this slipping between the real and the imagined in Perfect Blue to frighten, and here he uses it for something kinder. You do not need to know the Japanese films Chiyoko’s roles are quoting; the samurai, the ghost and the rocket are understood at a glance. And then the last ten minutes arrive, and they moved us more than we had thought an 87-minute cartoon about a woman chasing a stranger could. We will not say how. It is done with a cut to somewhere we did not expect, and it turns the whole film on a single line.
Watch it in one sitting and do not pause. Kon does not, and the film is short enough that you will not want to.
