Perfect Blue (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
** out of four
Dubbed in English from Japanese. Not Rated (Would be a strong R or an NC-17).
For those who do not know, "anime" is a Japanese form of animation. It has a very distinctive style and, with graphic violence and often nudity, it's strictly for adults. Perfect Blue is one of the few animes released on the big screen in the US and why they chose this one is beyond me. It's an intriguing but pretentious, confusing, often incoherent meditation on the nature of reality: a concept that has been explored so thoroughly in Hollywood the past couple years, did we really need to import a movie about it?
Perfect Blue tells the story of Mima, a lead singer for a pop group named "Cham" who decides to leave music for an acting career. Her first television role does not exactly fit in with her previous perky persona. In fact, her deeply troubled character resembles herself all too well; so much so that she begins to confuse her life with that of her television counterpart.
One day she finds a page on the internet entitled "Mima's Room". It has too much personal information: things other people wouldn't know unless they were watching her. At the same time, she begins getting anonymous letters -- one of them complete with a letter bomb -- and she grows frightened. Soon the stress of her job overwhelms her and she spaces out of reality. She is no longer able to separate the dream world from the real world and is haunted by visions of her pop-star alter ego and a mysterious man who seems intent on doing her harm.
After running it over in my head for hours, I am now pretty sure that I understand just what went on in Perfect Blue, but as I was watching I had no idea. This may have been the effect that director Satoshi Kon was going for, but either way it doesn't work; instead of enjoying the kinetic, visually charged production I was scratching my head. I have no problem with films that are, by their very nature, complex, but it's no fun when it gets to the point of being impossible to follow.
I understand that translating a film into English from another language is a daunting task, but when said film has pretentions of being a legitimate psychological thriller, its dialogue should not sound as if it was written by a third-grader. Here, the content does indeed suggest an adult suspenser but the dialogue seems to have come from The Iron Giant (especially botched is a scene where Mima is taught to use the internet: it comes like an extraordinarily bad commercial for an online service).
Well-made action sequences and a terrific, powerful soundtrack almost redeem this sloppy, incoherent movie. One of the reasons I love animation is that it makes it easy for filmmakers to stage long, complicated scenes that would be very difficult (i.e. expensive) to do when bound by the limits of the real world. Perfect Blue takes full advantage of this wonderful medium. The drawings themselves are fluid and realistic while the things they do with the drawings are amazing.
The film does look great, but my rating would have been at least a star higher had director Satoshi Kon paid a little less attention to the visuals and a more to narrative cohesion. I am a sucker for "what-is- reality" movies; even the otherwise lambasted The Thirteenth Floor eked out a 3-star rating from me. I definitely find the premise of Perfect Blue to be brimming with potential. Too bad the film disrupted my idea of reality with its mediocrity. ©1999 Eugene Novikov
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