Satoshi Kon's directorial follow-up to Perfect Blue is a somewhat lighter, less enveloping picture. We tail a pair of DIY documentarians, enamored with their subject, as they suss out the location of a reclusive former starlet and entice her to share her life's story. Truth and fiction intertwine in the telling of that particular saga, with personal memoirs stirred into various scenes from her best-loved screen performances. The result is a flighty, dreamlike atmosphere, a general easing in and out of the present that doesn't always follow a linear train of thought. It operates with a soft touch, which matches the understated nature of our aging narrator; smoothly straddling genres and decades en route to a destined meeting with a lost love.
That puts it on common thematic ground with both Perfect Blue and Paprika (Kon's 2006 swan song), which both toyed with perception and the meeting ground between internal and external realities. Millennium Actress, though, approaches the subject with reduced color and vigor, leaving less dangling threads to captivate audiences and fewer cornerstone visual showpieces to linger in their memories.
That puts it on common thematic ground with both Perfect Blue and Paprika (Kon's 2006 swan song), which both toyed with perception and the meeting ground between internal and external realities. Millennium Actress, though, approaches the subject with reduced color and vigor, leaving less dangling threads to captivate audiences and fewer cornerstone visual showpieces to linger in their memories.