Satoshi Kon: Millennium Actress (2001)

Satoshi Kon’s second feature film Millennium Actress is about as contemplative and metacinematic an animated film as you’re ever likely to watch. Doubling down on the filmmaking-focused narrative of Perfect Blue, the film explores the life of an aging actress through the movies that defined her career. Once again freed from logistical hurdles through the animation process, Kon takes the characters and the viewer on a ride through the actress’s life, musing about the meaning of her work and the viewer’s relationship to that work in the process. The result is a contemplative film that not only shows how profound artistic dedication can be, but also comes to the bittersweet conclusion that just as movies can make actors immortal, they are just imagined stories that both actors and viewers will never truly experience. It’s all a beautiful illusion and a reflection of the life acting it out.

At the beginning of the film, we meet television interviewer Genya Tachibana and cameraman Kyoji Ida as they head to Ginei Studios to interview Chiyoko Fujiwara, the now bankrupt studio’s biggest star who retired 30 years previously and became a recluse. The fictional studio is a clear analogue to real-life studio, Toho, while Chiyoko’s life mirrors that of Japanese stars Hideko Takamine and Setsuko Hara, who famously left acting behind after the death of Yasujiro Ozu in 1963. The film’s title card is presented over footage of Chiyoko’s film career playing in reverse, like a rewinding tape, announcing that what is to follow will explore the significance of that footage. When you combine that retrospective aspect with the film’s historical analogues, you realize that Kon intends the film as a commentary on the history of Japanese cinema.

Through Chiyoko’s career, Millennium Actress travels through many of the major periods and genres of Japanese film from the 1930s through to the 1970s. She begins her career making dramatic propaganda in Manchuria during the years of Japanese occupation only to go on to star in an Edo-period samurai epic with clear references to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), a kaiju picture, and finally a science-fiction feature in the 1970s. Kon goes to painstaking lengths to capture not only the visual styles of each genre depicted, but even their editing patterns. During a scene of the samurai epic, he composes a sword fight that would be at home in a Kurosawa film. Not only does he rely on a medium-wide shot in a long take, but when the swords start swinging, he cuts to three consecutive flashes and then the image of a leaf cut from a branch falling to the ground, before showing three men defeated on the ground. Such a sequence of shots seems right out of Yojimbo.

As in Perfect Blue, Kon also uses the filmmaking narrative to comment on filmmaking itself, in this case, the history of Japanese filmmaking and its role as propaganda during the Sino-Japanese War. His criticism is subtle—there’s nothing as damning as the filming of the rape scene in Perfect Blue to hit the point home—but it’s clear that Kon questions the artistic value of imperial Japanese cinema, even as he respects the artists who worked in it. As well, despite its historical fidelity, Millennium Actress is more interested in the character at its centre than the industry as a whole.

As Tachibana and Ida sit down with Chiyoko in her drawing room and interview her about her career, Tachibana presents her with a key from her past. She had lost it in the studio years before and its return prompts her to reflect on getting it in the first place. Thus begins the film’s biographical reflection, with us seeing Chiyoko’s life play out from her early childhood up to the shooting of her final film. In some ways, the reflective structure resembles most biographical dramas, but because the film is animated, Kon adjusts the rules of staging and has Tachibana and Ida enter the scenes of the past to passively interact with Chiyoko’s life story. 

What we see on screen are memories of Chiyoko’s past, but Kon presents them visually as Tachibana and Ida literally filming the memories, running after characters and pausing to ask questions of people in situations they don’t entirely comprehend. It’s a bold approach, but one that reaps many rewards. For one, it enlivens the scenes of the past by placing the observers literally into the scenes; frame narratives that have no stake in the flashbacks can get dull. As well, the approach allows Kon to showcase all the ways that film defines reality, as we’re learning about Chiyoko’s life through the films she made.

In Millennium Actress, film and memory are one of the same. In some moments, the film presents memories outside of Chiyoko’s cinematic career. This is most notably the case in Chiyoko’s formative memory of receiving the key, where she hides a dissident artist who is protesting the Sino-Japanese war. The man gives her the key in reward and she becomes fixated on the man and his mysterious disappearance, presumably to Manchuria where the Japanese occupied Chinese territory.

But as the film progresses, Kon increasingly depicts Chiyoko’s past entirely through her on-screen roles. Chiyoko agrees to star in a movie in Manchuria because she thinks she may come across the dissident. While there, she becomes a star, and as film takes on a greater importance in her life, her biographical memories bleed into the films she made. Kon shows a seamless transition from Chiyoko in Manchuria as an actress to her playing a character in a scene in Manchuria. Tachibana and Ida seem as stunned as we are as viewers when the presentation shifts; Ida even hilariously asks “Wasn’t this supposed to be a documentary?”

It’s all very meta, but it’s a fruitful way of getting across Kon’s thematic message that the lives of cinematic artists are defined by the films they make. As the film progresses, we learn that Chiyoko’s entire career was driven by her encounter with the dissident artist. Her desire to find him in Manchuria brought her into the film industry in the first place, and her rise to stardom was fueled by her desire to become famous so that he would recognize her on the big screen. At a certain point, the films that Chiyoko makes even seem to resemble her biography. Early in the film, we watch Chiyoko witness the artist fleeing police officers and she points them in the wrong direction. Later in the film, we watch a scene in one of her movies where her character does the same. The policeman in the film and the policeman of her past even share the same facial scar. Clearly, art and reality reflect each other, which is one of Kon’s major themes throughout his career.

But Kon is not just showing how a person’s reality informs their films; he’s showing that films inform their reality and help to create their meaning. Throughout the film, Kon presents a conceit that key moments in Chiyoko’s life occur during earthquakes. She was born during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and from then on, earthquakes announce significant changes in her life. In the opening scene of the film, we watch Chiyoko shooting a science-fiction film: her final role. Her character’s rocket blasts off and as it rumbles, Kon cuts to the real-world as Japan suffers a minor earthquake. Later, when we return to the space launch scene, we see an earthquake happen during the filming and Chiyoko loses the key that she kept on her person throughout her life. This signals her retirement and she leaves movies behind.

Using an earthquake as a metaphor is hardly subtle, but Kon is helping us to understand how we key into significant moments in our lives and instill those moments with meaning; by having those moments take place during an earthquake, Kon is using a pathetic fallacy to highlight these moment’s importance. He’s also showing how humans take incidental facts—such as Chiyoko being born during an earthquake, which is not something she could ever control—and see patterns in that random information. It’s possible that Chiyoko was cued into seeing any earthquake as significant merely because she was born during one. Thus, the story she tells herself about her life also informs her life. In essence, the act of remembering shapes the memory.

It’s also no accident that a physical “key” is the key to understanding Chiyoko’s artistic motivation. Again, Millennium Actress is not subtle, but it’s rewarding in its examination of how artists ascribe meaning to their lives. The film clarifies its significance later in the film when we learn that Tachibana worked at Genei Studios as a young man. He happened to find Chiyoko’s key, but didn’t learn it’s significance until later in his life when he learns about her life and career. For a brief period of the film, the perspective shifts to Tachibana’s and we learn about his motivations as a documentor and admirer of Chiyoko’s life and work. His obsession with her leads him to becoming a television interviewer and documentarian. Thus, Chiyoko’s own art inspires a new generation of artists. But the film’s reflections go further. 

Tachibana is so obsessed with Chiyoko’s life that he largely ignores his own. He devotes his own artistic life to exploring her artistic accomplishments and desperately wants to experience her life for himself. When he gets to finally hear Chiyoko tell her life story and we watch him interact with her memories on screen, he’s beside himself in joy. But Tachibana can never truly inhabit her memories; he can experience them, as we watch him do on screen, but they’re only ever shadows of Chiyoko’s life at that point, filmed experiences that represent her life, but don’t completely capture it. 

Thus, Chiyoko takes the place in Tachibana’s life that the dissident artist took in Chiyoko’s own, creating a fractal structure that ripples out across the film. We also come to learn that Tachibana’s relationship to Chiyoko’s life is the same that viewers have towards any film they watch. Films allow viewers to experience fantastical stories outside of their own lives, to see into the hearts and minds of other people, but although they can let viewers experience some of the emotions of these other people’s lives, they can never let them truly live them. Viewers are always outside of a film looking into its story, just as Tachibana is always on the outside of Chiyoko’s life reflecting on it.

This bittersweet reflection becomes the counterweight to the film’s resolution on cinematic immortality. As the film winds down, Chiyoko reflects on her obsession with the dissident artist and admits the true motivation for her being an actress on the big screen: “I wanted him to see me as the girl I once was.” Chiyoko’s vain director husband, Junichi Otaki, comments at one point in the film that an actress is merely a colour on a canvas (which has echoes of the callous attitude towards actresses explored in Perfect Blue). But the comment does have some truth in its implication that movies are paintings and the performers in them the colours applied on the canvas. This metaphor helps us to understand Chiyoko’s entire life as an attempt to immortalize an image of her youth on the canvas of the silver screen. And in a sense, she accomplishes that goal, as her impact and the beautiful art of her youth will forever be preserved in the movies, even as she dies.

Chiyoko wanted to freeze her life at the moment she met the artist, as it’s the moment when she was most alive and life seemed most vivid and full of possibilities. Tachibana wanted to leave his life behind and experience Chiyoko’s life through her movies and life story. Both Chiyoko and Tachibana get their wishes, but only to a point, all thanks to the magic of the movies. Because Millennium Actress shows that while movies are magic, they’re also illusions, nothing more than dreams projected on the silver screen. The bittersweet truth is holding the magic and the illusion simultaneously, comprehending the truth in the fiction and the real human being behind the character on the screen.

9 out of 10

Millennium Actress (2001, Japan)

Directed by Satoshi Kon; written by Sadayuki Murai and Satoshi Kon, based on a story by Satoshi Kon; starring Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama, Fumiko Orikasa, Shozo Iizuka, Shoko Tsuda, Hirotaka Suzuoko, Hisako Kyoda, Koichi Yamadera, Masane Tsukayama.

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