Millennium Actress

In one of the defining apocryphal stories of early Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock, arguably the defining director of the Hays Code era, was quoted as saying, “Actors are cattle.” It may not have been true, but it does define the way a lot of us as cinephiles tend to think about the art of acting. When an actor we don’t like gives a good performance, they’re “used well” or “well cast.” Even actors we enjoy seeing get boiled down to their schtick—Al Pacino is intense, Jodie Foster is both strong AND vulnerable, Tom Cruise is cocky and will eventually kill himself for our amusement, etc. It’s a peculiar aspect of a certain section of film fandom to take for granted; these are the people playing out the stories for our amusement, but many of us think of them as just another color in a director’s palette. 

That last sentiment is said, almost verbatim, by a director in Satoshi Kon’s 2002 masterwork Millennium Actress. It’s a statement Kon emphatically disagrees with—the character saying it is a liar and a manipulator, one of the closest things the movie has to a villain, and the documentary filmmaker viewing the scene calls it out for being the insulting bullshit it is. It’s that documentary filmmaker, Genya Tachibana (Shinzo Iizuka), that Kon clearly sees himself as: not a sensitive, self-important artiste, but a movie lover who’s willing to engage in fantasy in order to tease out larger emotional truths. 

By that point, it was certainly becoming Kon’s MO. His first film, Perfect Blue, used trompe l’oeil visuals to blur reality and fantasy to portray its heroine’s fragmenting psyche. Millennium Actress is superficially similar—a puzzle-box anime about an actress unable to distinguish between reality and fiction—but the differences are telling. Perfect Blue is ultimately a horror/mystery film about getting lost in fiction. Millennium Actress is about how fiction can help us make sense of reality. There’s a warmth in Millennium Actress that puts it closer to Kon’s subsequent feature, the humanist alt-Christmas classic Tokyo Godfathers.

Millennium Actress begins with the destruction of Ginei Studios, once home to the movie star Chiyoko Fujiwara (voiced by Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama, and Fumiko Orikasa at different ages). Genya and his cameraman Kyoji Ida (Masaya Onosaka, who provides humorous running commentary throughout the film) are granted an interview with Chiyoko, her first in 30 years. Genya gifts her a key, which she tells him “opens the most important thing,” and begins an extended reflection on her life. As a young girl, she helped hide an artist and political dissident during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and formed an intense connection with him over the course of a single meeting. As she tells the story of how she spent most of her life trying to reunite with him, the story of her life blurs with the films she starred in, with Genya and Kyoji watching like unseen ghosts. Segments start out as clearly rooted in truth and bend and warp until they become scenes from films she starred in (among those referenced— Throne of Blood, Godzilla, and 2001); things that can only happen in fiction haunt her throughout her life in a way that implies that they were real. The truth of her experiences with the artist and how her time with him ended are revealed only under the guise of a scene from a movie she starred in. Mysteries intertwine—How did Genya get the key, and what, exactly, does it open? Why did Chiyoko retire and become a recluse 30 years ago? Did she ever meet the artist again?—and watching these questions solve each other is half the fun of the movie. Throughout, a motif begins to emerge of Chiyoko falling, getting up, and resuming her chase.

The ending is infamous for making audiences feel betrayed by revealing the ultimate purpose of that pursuit, recontextualizing the meaning of the movie in its final line. I think it’s brilliant, turning a simple but surreal story of lost love into an exploration of what makes us human. It’s easy to get hung up on paths not taken, words left unsaid, memories that plague your thoughts like an unscratchable itch. Even the happiest lives are haunted by regrets and thoughts of what could have been. What Millennium Actress implies in its final moment is that these are just as important as our lived experiences, if not more. Life is unsatisfying, because we are unsatisfiable, and accepting this is essential to our humanity. These are the lives we live; these are the stories we tell. Movies are memory; the actors are us.