Millennium
Actress (Sennen joyu), directed by Satoshi
Kon, is an animated film that takes the form of an interview
in
2003
with a once-popular
actress, now in seclusion at the age of seventy. Genya
Tachibana (voiced by Shozo Iizuka), a documentary interviewer
and his camera-holding assistant Kyoji Ida (voiced by Masaya
Onosaka) arrive at her hard-to-find residence with a special
present--a key which the interviewer says that he found
amid the rubble of a now-defunct studio, which is being
razed. From her twenties, Chiyoko (voiced by Mami Koyama)
was a star for the film company, but she abruptly retired
in 1973. The elderly Chiyoko (voiced by Miyoko Shoji) is
delighted to receive the key, which she lost in a studio
accident exactly thirty years earlier. As her narrative
unfolds, there are flashbacks to events of the past, from
the Edo and Meiji periods to the nationalistic 1920s, World
War II, and the poverty of a Tokyo laid waste by American
bombs. Throughout, the interviewer and camera are on the
scene, a surreal touch that provides a few comic lines.
When she is born in 1923, an earthquake shakes Tokyo. At
first, her mother does not want teenage Chiyoko (voiced
by Fukimo Orikasa) to become an actress, which she considers
to be a lowly profession. However, one day a mysterious
man (voiced by Kohichi Yamadera) appears on a road, gives
her some comfort, passes the key to her, and disappears
under hot pursuit from police. Rather than allowing the
police to track the mystery man down, she misdirects police,
hoping to locate him again to return the key. When she
learns that he is in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, she volunteers
her services to the film company, which plans a patriotic
movie on location in Manchuria. However, she always finds
herself a few steps behind the mystery man, whom she tracks
back to Japan over the years. Some of her recollections
coincide with films that she made in which the events of
Japan from 1931 to 1973 occasionally provide context. Chiyoko
quits when an earthquake causes an accident in the film
studio that almost takes her life; one of the production
staff saves her life. Losing the key in the debris from
the damage caused by the earthquake, she realizes that
she cannot return the key and thus that her reason for
becoming an actress has gone astray. When her narrative
ends, the interviewer confesses that he is the one who
saved her life. Just then, an earthquake hits. Seriously
injured, she is hospitalized, but on her deathbed she is
serene in the knowledge that she will finally meet the
mystery man, who fell victim to the death penalty, in the
great beyond. Clearly, the story is a variation on the
theme of Madame Butterfly, with
the heroine pursuing a lover steadfastly and then being
relieved in death of the
emptiness of an unrequited love. MH
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