Satoshi Kon Month: Millennium Actress

In my Paprika review, I talked about director Satoshi Kon’s ability to explore the human condition through surreal art. Paprika was a masterpiece that deconstructed the human mind to create a psychological thriller like no other. Despite its exploration of the human mind however, something lacking from it, not to a fault mind you, but still rather noticeably is the element of human emotion. Fortunately his catalogue is not devoid of stories that tug at the heartstrings. If Paprika was his mindbender, “Millennium Actress” is undoubtedly his art house film, minus the pretention.

Chiyoko Fujiwara is a famous actress, now living her life as an old woman, retired and in seclusion. Aiming to create a documentary about her, film director Genya Tachibana tracks her down hoping to have a conversation with her for his film, leading to the telling of Chiyoko’s life story. Through the use of Chiyoko’s filmography to interpret specific events in her life, the film tells the story of Chiyoko’s life, starting from living in fascist pre-World War II era Japan as a teenager, where she encounters an artist running from the government and falls in love with him. His opposition to the government forces him to flee but when she realizes that he has left behind the key to his art supplies, she dedicates herself to tracking him down to return it and profess her love to him. In order to do this, she takes an offer by a director to for a lead role in his film which shoots in the location that the artist fled in, marking the start of her long career and journey to find him by using her job as an actress as a means to travel.

The movie is essentially a telling of Chiyoko’s life story, covering her growth from a teenage girl into a woman and detailing her search for the artist. Where the story takes a different turn however, it that story is not simply narrated through flashback but rather it uses cinematic settings, that are hinted to be films that Chiyoko has worked on, as an illustration of different points in her life and a representation of her own personal conflict within those moments. For example, when Chiyoko is being told to let go of her childish goals of finding her lost love, it’s done while shooting a drama in which the character she is playing struggles to grasp control of her own life and stop listening to her mother. When she is reunited with her love and he is taken into custody, the scene unfolds in a feudal era Japan complete with the arresting police depicted as samurai. Told in a very metafictional fashion, the film leaves you constantly guessing as to how to interpret the story unfolding on screen.

The film never deliberately tells you what is real, what is fictional, what is symbolic, or even if any of it is real in the first place. A room of three people can watch this film and come up with six different interpretations total, neither of them having any less credibility than the other.

“Millennium Actress” keeps you thinking throughout the course of its entire hour and a half run time, as you not only cheer Chiyoko on in her goal but hope and pray that wherever her journey takes her, she ends it being happy. I found myself emotionally invested in every second of the film from start to finish, holding my breath when it got suspenseful, being genuinely surprised at the twists and turns that the story makes and ultimately being nearly moved to tears at the heart wrenching final revelation of the ending.

Kon proves his understanding of the human condition with “Millennium Actress”. This film has instilled in me every possible emotion in the spectrum and my only regret is that it took me this long to discover its greatness.


10/10