The Thrasher's Word

 

Perfect Blue

 

 

Format: Movie (91 Minutes)
Genre: Pychological, Thriller, Horror, Drama
Studio: Madhouse
Director: Satoshi Kon

"Perfect Blue" occupies a unique position amid other anime in more than one respect. For one, it's one of the few mainstream anime to actually receive the UK's 18 certificate, an honour which it shares with only one film of similar status and profile, that being "Ninja Scroll." For another, it's scary. And I don't mean "scary" in the kind of patronising sense that it's usually applied to horror anime where "scary" is polite hyperbole for "a little atmospheric, I guess." No, I mean it frightened me, in the sense that it had me lying awake at two in the morning, profoundly unnerved by the blinking red light on the smoke detector on the ceiling of my room. And everyone I've watched it with has said the same thing afterwards: "that was awesome," in the same tone of horrified awe. Consider the gravity of that notion for a moment. It is fundamentally almost impossible for a cartoon to be scary; because of the stylisation and antirealism inherent in the medium, we don't identify with the camera the same way that we do in live-action. It doesn't lend itself to that sense of the viewer's presence, and therefore vulnerability. Satoshi Kon's directorial debut, however, overcomes these barriers with spectacular grace. "Perfect Blue" is a psychological nightmare of hitherto unimaginable vividity, an unrelenting psychological bombardment, positively drenched in atmosphere, which forces the viewer to warp their own mind just to contemplate the narrative curveballs it throws. In fact, so well does it subvert the fabric of normality and reality, so effectively does it make ambiguous aspects of the story which the viewer thought concrete, so thoroughly does it undermine and destroy any expectations one might have that to call it anything less than a masterpiece would be downright callous.

"Perfect Blue" introduces us to Mima, Mimarin to her fans, a small-time pop star with fledgling girl band Cham. Seeking a change of image, she leaves Cham to pursue an acting career, but the best she's able to do is to land a bit role in a local TV murder-mystery drama. Work related problems aside, she begins receiving threatening phone calls and faxes, starts to notice a spooky, buck-toothed man following her, and discovers a website called Mima's Room where details of her life have been posted which no-one should be able to know. It isn't long before people close to her start to be found dead, murdered in grotesque ways. And as if all that wasn't enough, she begins to see cheery, smiling visions of herself in her Cham outfit. As her life begins to unravel around her, we begin to question if Mima is sane, or even real. How much of her situation is real, if any, and how much is it an out-of-control fantasy concocted by her own disturbed mind?

You might think, from the above synopsis, that "Perfect Blue" is just a straightforward stalker story, one which claims to be ambiguous but in actuality is pretty clear-cut. Guess again. The genius of "Perfect Blue" is that it is always one step ahead of you, that every time you think you have it figured out, it adds a new dimension to the mindf***. And sure, for a while everything seems reasonably easy to follow, but around the halfway point, Satoshi Kon pulls the rug out from under your feet. He gives us plots-within-plots-within-plots, dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams, piling on one layer after another until any conception the viewer has of everyday narrative has been obliterated and washed away. We're left completely lost in a state where all preconceived notions are gone; nothing is indefinite, nowhere is safe, no-one is above suspicion and no victory or defeat is final because at any moment, without warning, Mima might wake up. We, the audience, are made incapable of trusting anything we see on screen; we're made as confused and helpless as Mima is. It makes "The Matrix" look like "The Office," but even so, there is a method in Kon's madness. Looking at it in retrospect after it's all over, the pieces suddenly fit. There is a logic connecting all of the seemingly contradictory sequences, an overarching logic which makes sense of the left-field final revelation and the surprisingly upbeat ending. "Perfect Blue" is not just an extension of the cheaply manipulative dream-within-a-dream scenario; rather, it makes the audience subject to a force as fiendishly purposeful and Machivellian as that which torments Mima. And believe me, that takes some doing.

On a technical level, the devious insanity of "Perfect Blue's" narrative is complimented perfectly by its direction. Kon's style is quite expressionistic, uses a lot of shots of the camera zooming in on and panning around characters' faces, as though calling the backdrop against which they're set into question, suggesting it's somehow an illusion; to emphasise this effect, sometimes a pan will be used to move from one hallucination to the next rather than an edit, calling attention to the ambiguity of which one is real, if either. Sometimes he even goes so far as to have shots of Mima juxtaposed against her own face. Kon demonstrates an interest in the idea of different levels of fictional consciousness, of fictions-within-fictions, and the constant suggestion of unreality is subtle as well as unsettling. The presence of a fiction, after all, suggests the presence of an author, and therefore there always seems to be an unseen, malign presence lurking between the frames. Oh, and the 18 rating? "Perfect Blue" earns it in spades. While some of the sexual elements are maybe a bit gratuitous, we certainly take the omnipresent sense of dread and threat seriously when we see some of the things that get done to the characters. There's one scene I won't spoil except to say that it involves a pizza delivery and a screwdriver, and that it makes me shiver just thinking about it. Couple all of that with a score of dissonant, aggravated humming and you're in for one deeply unsettling cinematic experience.

The themes of identity and the extent to which it is a social construct is one which Satoshi Kon seems rather taken with: he's also explored it in 2006's "Paprika." While I thought "Paprika" was an excellent film, superbly written and thematically rich, I also thought that a lot of the imagery it employed was turgid and overwrought, and at times I didn't feel so much like I was extracting a point from it all as I was having technicolour weirdness vomitted all over me. Kon's debut is, in many ways, just as surreal a film as "Paprika," but more visually restrained and nuanced. Beneath all the levels of Alfred-Hitchcock-meets-David-Lynch freakishness (and indeed, largely due to them), "Perfect Blue" manages to deliver a cutting and direct commentary on one's identity being as much defined by one's image as defining it. The stalker and the website aren't so much literal as they are manifestations of Mima's identity crisis upon leaving Cham, an internal conflict which everyone experiences at some point. The real question at the heart of "Perfect Blue" isn't so much who the stalker is, but rather who Mima is; a notion beautifully represented in scenes where she talks to her own hallucinatory self in the Cham dress. The oddly optimistic ending might occur to some as a cop-out on a heavy theme, but nevertheless, there are few anime which make you think as hard on the topics they deal with, or implement those topics so subtly.

Bottom line: if you haven't seen "Perfect Blue," you are hereby suspended from doing anything else until you have. There's nothing else like it in the realm of anime, and very little even in live-action. It is simply a brilliant piece of animation, one which transcends every boundary associated with the medium. It delivers an unparalleled psychological assault with a remarkably deft subtext, dances that fine line between genius and madness, is directed with flair, is written with wit and will scare the living bejeesus out of you. It is - I do relish saying it, believe me - a masterpiece that puts every other anime that aspires to psychological realism in the shade.

LAA Rating: ****

Rating System:

* - Horrible
*1/2 – Very Bad
** - Bad
**1/2 – Good
*** - Very Good
***1/2 – Excellent
**** - Masterpiece

If you have any feedback, criticism or questions relating to this review or any other, please e-mail me at The_Thrashers_Word@hotmail.com