It is without regret that Mima, singer, leaves her band to devote herself to a career as an actress. She accepts a small part in a television series. However, her sudden departure from the band caused the anger of her fans...
Ideally put into orbit by his mentor Katsuhiro Otomo first in the world of manga (where he will be his assistant on Akira) then that of animation (Roujin Z, the magnificent sketches film for which he designs the sets and signs the scripts, including the one for the best sketch Magnetic Rose), Satoshi Kon finally took off with this inaugural blow of brilliance that will be Perfect Blue. As will be widely seen later, the inspiration of Satoshi Kon is much more focused on "live" cinema than animation - his Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is an unofficial remake of the Son of the Desert (1948) by John Ford - and his influences are more Western than Japanese, that one remains in the field of cinema - Terry Gilliam and his trilogy of the imaginary (Bandits, Bandits (1982), Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of the Baron Münchhausen (1988) - or on the side of literature with Philip K. Dick (although still the Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose Paprika he will adapt and to whom we owe The Passage of Time, is an acknowledged reference).
In all these influences, there is an attraction for authors who have distorted the perception of reality, a theme that will be at the heart of the director’s work. Kon mixes this with a typical Japanese subject, namely the fascination for Idols, these ephemeral local starlets navigating between formatted pop music, modeling and cinema, whose lolita’s attractions attract a horde of more or less recommendable fans. We follow the misadventures of one of them, Mima, who will leave his successful group to embrace a career of actress to the great despair of his admirers, in particular of one of them very dangerous. After creating a web page where he endorses his identity while seeming surprisingly informed of his daily life, he will gradually threaten the most influential members of her entourage and cause it to gradually move away from the ideal image of the Idol he makes of her. Satoshi Kon created from the beginning a confusion between dream and reality, which will go increasing with the tension and especially the mental state of his heroine.
We understand it from the opening scene in which, still soberly, we have a mimicry through the montage, the play on the connections between Mima’s daily life and her Idol existence that she is about to leave. The separation still remains well defined and perceptible but the director, by mixing a classical suspense and the artist’s own existential anxieties, will gradually lose us in a maze where we will no longer distinguish anything. The threat is thus as much external as intimate with a heroine unleashing passions by her choices far removed from her former polished career (naked photos, shooting explicit sexual scenes) ; and her own doubts and guilt merge with those of the most virulent fans, many times suggesting that the harasser is a creation of his mind.
The staging of Satoshi Kon thus obeys more the codes of the schizophrenic thriller (we often think of the Polanski Repulsion) where the notion of point of view is mistreated by the wobbly mind of Mima. It’s first of all characters that disappear and then reappear in the same sequence and make us doubt what we see (the presence/absence of the perverted fan on the shooting of the movie) before it’s the sequences themselves which retreat into a disturbing maelstrom where reality and fiction are indistinct, each skid ending in a sudden awakening of Mima who no longer knows if she lived, dreamed or shot what we just saw. For even more confusion, this loss of identity and landmarks also corresponds to the plot of the film that Mima makes with a schizophrenic character following a trauma. Satoshi Kon lets as much a false reality invade our perception as the most pronounced nightmarish fantasy, with the tortured and invasive double of Mima symbolizing her guilt but which will take a more concrete turn in the conclusion.The brilliance of the directing compensates for the few technical shortcomings of a work with a modest budget, with in particular static backgrounds and scenes of coarse crowds where the population remains in the state of silhouettes without details. The influence of the film (which will travel widely and will be rewarded many times in festivals) is considerable, in particular with a certain Darren Aronofsky who will take up an identical plan in his Requiem for a Dream (2000) - Mima curled up in his bathtub howling in silence is imitated by Jennifer Connely in the latter - and many situations in Black Swan (2010), including the games of mirrors and reflections.
It will take a few years later the turn of a Christopher Nolan to ogle this time on Paprika (2007). Even if he seeks above all to transpose ideas of "live" staging here, Kon brilliantly knows how to use the codes of animation when it comes to pouring into pure baroque, especially when concluding with unreal displacements of Mima's double, even reaching pure genius when he confuses fantasy and real in the same sequence (the reflection of the window pane showing the real face of the double in a mad grin while a radiant and disturbing Mima hops right next to it) . The result is simply amazing and more than a great animated film, Satoshi Kon signs one of the greatest thrillers of the last twenty years and shows himself worthy of the greatest from this trial run. The craziest is that the best was yet to come.
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