Satoshi Kon’s first film returns to cinemas from 22 to 24 April, an unmissable event to discover one of the most influential films of the 90s in Perfect Blue
Nobody really knows Satoshi Kon when it arrived in theaters in Japan in 1997 Perfect Bluehis first feature film after working for a few years as a manga and anime screenwriter (getting noticed by Katsuhiro Otomo and collaborating with Mamoru Oshii, two animation authorities of those years). But this is secondary. The most important thing is that no one has ever seen a film like it Perfect Blue. Anime was already a serious thing, Studio Ghibli had already been born and adult anime had been coming out for well over a decade. However, no one had ever created an animated film which, despite referring to a genre (after all, it is a detective story), worked so hard on the story of the protagonist’s psyche, which was at the same time completely rooted in a realism which was impressive in terms of detail and precision and in the world of the mind. No one had ever made an animated film so closely inspired by real life cinema, only Mamoru Oshii had approached it two years earlier with Ghost In The Shell.
Like almost all of his subsequent works Kon Perfect Blue it is the story of a person existing in two states or situations or conditions at the same time. It has a plot, even quite linear, but the most important thing is the story of how the mind struggles to reconcile these two states, how one can be one thing and its opposite and the attempt to stage the exact point in which the two states become confused. In the story, a singer who is part of a trio, Mima, decides to abandon music (and therefore an identity that she created) and start a career as an actress, in which she will therefore take on different identities from time to time. At that moment a deranged man obsessed with her follows her and in a certain sense haunts her. The more she works as an actress, the more Mima struggles to reconcile reality and fiction, acting, set and her past as a singer, while all around the production in which she is working several people are killed in what appear to be murders committed by her.
The murders, the blood, the violence and even a fake rape (acted in the production in which Mima participates) are a tool and not the end, this is not a film of violence strictly speaking even if it contains it, it is one of the many expedients through which two sides of a mind mix, black and white. After all, it was the ’90s, the ones in which the figure of the serial killer was in fashion most of all. Mima is introduced in an initial scene, beautiful, pure, a slightly sexy and somewhat innocent j-pop doll, and then as a very normal girl living in a small chaotic apartment. An ordinary person who begins to slip into something that is not always easy to understand because he is no longer able to reconcile what he is, i.e. reality, and what he pretends to be for work, i.e. the identity of a j-pop singer and then the fictitious identities of the roles he plays.
In 1997 the cinema had made plenty of films about double or multiple personalities. And how! But these were almost always films in which we discover at the end, surprisingly, that the protagonist or deuteragonist has another personality and therefore what we thought were two characters are only one (Psycho) or we know straight away that two completely different souls are fighting inside a character (Double personality). Up until that point cinema had treated the boundary between two identities as two clear and separate states. They are one thing or the other, they usually also have two names so that the audience knows when the character is X and when it has changed and is Y. What is striking at the time and still today Perfect Blue it’s that it wants to do the exact opposite, it wants to stage the blurred border between states, to confuse and not clarify. And it’s amazing how many different ways Kon found in this film to represent this border (beyond the more usual and overused mirrors), sometimes an object passing in front of “the lens” is enough to reveal that there is a border.
Of course, at the center of everything is Mima and her old j-pop identity, but what if Perfect Blue it is so profoundly dense it is because it itself slips between the two realities, formally its own. It is not just the story of a person who has more than one conflicting identity but the story of that conflict there through a character. The difference lies in the fact that very often the film is not clear to us and deceives us, it shows us a scene in which Mima does something, only to then (with an editing cut) reveal that she is acting on the set. So that wasn’t her, but a character she played. Or she shows us something that seems real and then reveals that it is a dream or the fruit of her imagination. At certain points she doesn’t even explain it, so that we too end up in that state Mima is in, where it is no longer possible to understand what is true and what is not.
It is the struggle for awakening: when it is not clear whether one is dreaming or conscious, whether what happened is true or imagined. That liminal zone is everything Perfect Blue. And also the detective story, that is, the murders and the constant suspicion of who the murderer might be, whether it really is Mima or the man obsessed with her who runs a website about her and lives in an apartment covered in her photos, it’s part of that strategy of continuous distraction.
AND Videodrome in a certain sense, that is, the confusion between what is filmed and what is real, but also De Palma, the idea that looking at something or someone through a lens is a form of possession. In short, it is something that has belonged to cinema since before 1997 but which Perfect Blue takes it to a decidedly more obsessive level. As one had never seen before but perhaps it is more correct to say, as one had never experienced it. Because Mima has created other identities for work, in particular that of a j-pop singer which she then decided to abandon but which does not seem to want to abandon her, and which lives as a form of doubling impossible to manage. With one hand she nurtures this and other identities on the set, with the other she tries to be herself. As in real life cinema, each one is lit differently.
This is exactly what then, sixteen years later, Darren Aronofski will explore in The black Swan: a girl who takes on two identities for work and is unable to reconcile them with her private life, ending up in a spiral of violence that we don’t really understand where it comes from.
Stay updated by following us on TikTok too!
