{"id":309695,"date":"2021-07-28T00:25:20","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T21:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-daily-stream-millennium-actress-is-a-masterpiece-for-the-ages\/"},"modified":"2021-07-28T00:25:20","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T21:25:20","slug":"the-daily-stream-millennium-actress-is-a-masterpiece-for-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-daily-stream-millennium-actress-is-a-masterpiece-for-the-ages\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Daily Stream: \u2018Millennium Actress\u2019 is a Masterpiece for the Ages"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The Daily Stream: \u2018Millennium Actress\u2019 is a Masterpiece for the Ages<\/strong>”
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(Welcome to\u00a0<\/i>T<\/i><\/b>he Daily Stream<\/i><\/b>, an ongoing series<\/a> in which the \/Film team shares what they\u2019ve been watching, why it\u2019s worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)<\/i><\/p>\n

The Movie:<\/strong>\u00a0Millennium Actress<\/em><\/p>\n

Where You Can Stream It:<\/strong>\u00a0Criterion Channel<\/p>\n

The Pitch:\u00a0<\/strong>Two documentary filmmakers score an interview with an elusive legendary actress who had mysteriously retired 30 years earlier. While she walks them through her life from her childhood in war-torn Japan to her career as one of the most beloved screen icons in the country, they find themselves transformed from observers to participants in her life and her movies, aiding the actress in her eternal search for a man with whom she met and fell in love with as a teenager.<\/p>\n

Why It\u2019s Essential Viewing:\u00a0<\/strong>The Criterion Channel recently added Millennium Actress<\/em>\u00a0to its Art-House Animation series<\/a>, which is a good time to remind you that director Satoshi Kon<\/strong>,\u00a0in his tragically short career, never made a single bad movie. While Western audiences may be more familiar with his widely influential masterworks\u00a0Paprika<\/em> or\u00a0Perfect Blue<\/em> (which inspired films like\u00a0Inception<\/em> and\u00a0Requiem for a Dream<\/em>, respectively),\u00a0Millennium Actress<\/em> remains my favorite film of his. A dreamy, nostalgic love letter to cinema,\u00a0Millennium Actress<\/em> is possibly Kon’s least cynical and most romantic film \u2014 even when Chiyoko, the titular actress, admits of her eternal search for her lost love: “After all, it’s the chasing after him that I really\u00a0love!”<\/span><\/p>\n

Yearning. It’s what powers so much of cinema \u2014 the yearning for love, for power, for connection. And\u00a0Millennium Actress<\/em> both unpacks and embraces that yearning, by telling the story of a young woman,\u00a0Chiyoko Fujiwara, who is forever searching for one man for her entire life.<\/p>\n

She meets him as a teenager, after he bumps into her on the street and kindly offers her a hand before she notices that he’s bleeding. Realizing that he’s a political revolutionary on the run from the Japanese government, she hides him away in her family shed, where he tells her that he’s a painter who opposes the Sino-Japanese War and promises to tell her about his hometown. However, before she can meet him again, he’s discovered by authorities and is forced to go on the run again, but not before he hands her a key that he tells her unlocks something “important.”<\/p>\n

Chiyoko cherishes the key and decides to become an actress so that someday the man might see her and they can be reunited again. The yearning lights a fire not only in her soul, but in her acting career \u2014 always playing a character searching for the love of her life. It turns her into a screen icon and a national treasure, so much so that she eventually begins to lose the distinction between the characters that she plays and the teenage girl she was when she fell in love. Even the two documentary filmmakers, who parse through Chiyoko’s life as she tells it, starts to mix reality and fiction together too \u2014 travel<\/a>ing with Chiyoko from the wintry vistas of Manchuria where she shot her first film, to feudal Japan where she played a warrior princess, to the skies that she traverses as a lovesick astronaut, to the war-torn World War II countryside where Chiyoko is taken prisoner for abetting a political fugitive.<\/p>\n

The film is depicted in muted colors in a nostalgic imitation of Japanese cinema from the ’40s to the ’70s (some of the shots might be pulled directly from a\u00a0Yasujiro Ozu film), with the exception of the bright red scarf that Chiyoko remembers her lost lover by. It’s a\u00a0lavish, reality-blurring piece of cinematic art that plays\u00a0with the medium in ways that live-action would be hard-pressed to imitate, nor should it.<\/p>\n

There is so much\u00a0stuff<\/em> in\u00a0Millennium Actress<\/em> \u2014 a star-crossed romance, an\u00a0All About Eve<\/em> rivalry between an aging diva and a young starlet, a tapestry of the rich and complicated recent history of Japan. But amidst all of these things \u2014 not to mention the love letter to cinema that spans sci-fi, kaiju, historical, and horror genres \u2014 is a surprisingly subdued treatise on identity. It’s one of Kon’s favorite theme<\/a>s \u2014 he’s explored the construction of the self in the psychological thriller\u00a0Perfect Blue<\/em> and the sci-fi adventure\u00a0Paprika<\/em>. But here is Kon’s most delicate examination of the idea, one that is much more ordinary and bittersweet. Age, and eventually death, may come for us all, but it’s in the yearning that we stay eternally young.<\/p>\n

The post The Daily Stream: ‘Millennium Actress’ is a Masterpiece for the Ages appeared first on \/Film.<\/p>\n