Thread of Perfect Blue (1997)

I did search for one but besides a thread about Paprika I didn’t find anything besides mentions in various threads. Anyway, ended up watching this at the weekend and LOVED it. (Also read the light novel this is based on, which I’ll get to after).

I’m not going to waste time explaining what this film is about - if you’re in this thread, you already know.

The late 90s urban Japanese setting really works for me aesthetically - the shadowed alleys, the remote skyline, the sense of isolation in the midst of numbers. Visually this anime style can look a bit dated BUT I thought it really works. The colour palette is quite dark and the violence feels shocking, as it should.

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Also, the music in this is incredible. And that Cham song is a straight up banger.

I think the main themes in this - main character can’t trust themselves, reality is precarious and suggestions of a darker self and deeds done without conscious knowledge threaten to drown them - aren’t novel but this is incredible execution of these.

I saw Black Swan years ago so the obvious references to this film made in that leaped out - the untrustworthy reflections, the mirror shard. Like Black Swan, the film goes into the demands of being a young female artist and the conflicting aims of purity and sexuality. Perfect Blue doesn’t do the body restrictions so much - I guess as an idol movie it’s implied since the audience will have at least passing knowledge of the brutal regime idols are put through - but there is a line early on where a member of Cham asks for a drink before going on stage and is told “you can drink after the show!” You can find video compilations of idols fainting. It’s pretty fucking grim!

Reading the light novel this film is based on was interesting because:

- it is much MUCH darker, and Perfect Blue is already a very dark film

- the decision to change the villain from the obsessive (male) fan to Rumi is …a choice? Not saying it doesn’t work for the film, because of the whole losing-her-mind-but-being-gaslit thing, but given what we do know about obsessive fans and the lengths they go to, the decision to move to a female villain over a male one felt like it left out a lot. Again, the film is a work of art, and it does work. There’s also a female antagonist in the novel but she is secondary to the male villain.

- There’s simply no way they could have adapted the novel as is and I’m very glad they didn’t. Parts of it are truly grotesque. The film does a good job at fleshing out Mina and she is warmer and more realistic as a character. Her character in the novel is (ironically?) almost more of a cardboard cutout: 2D & flimsy.

Hide text cos it’s mostly me going on about Helter Skelter (Okazaki):

One of the reasons I wanted to read the source material was to see when it was written so I could see if there was any overlap with Helter Skelter (by Kyoko Okazaki. Basically, not really?

Okazaki is much more brutal in her details of what it takes for a young female celebrity to reach the top, and there’s some overlap between the grotesque things Liliko puts herself through and the mostly alluded to demands of idols. Okazaki’s Liliko also has a personal assistant that’s a key part of the story but she abuses her assistant , rather than what happens with Mina & Rumi. Mina is an innocent in a dirty industry, whereas Liliko was never innocent and openly acts to secure her position. There’s a few scenes where she’s talking to her reflection or dreams that are hallucinations and reality is unreal, but they’re much more minor in comparison as a focal point. The low profit margins for these acts - the money put into Cham, how much Mother spends on Liliko’s upkeep and how resulting cutthroat the industry is was an intriguing point that comes up across both works but that’s background. It’s definitely something I’d recommend to anyone who loves Perfect Blue but as a parallel contemporary work, not related. Maybe the dark twin of this work - what if it’s the person at the centre of things who’s the monster and how can they be stopped?

I felt the ending was a little dissatisfying, but overall an incredible film. I couldn’t believe how far they went with the nudity and violence. The simulated rape scene for the TV show is really uncomfortable viewing even though it’s animated and even though the actors playing the rapists are apologising to Mina! I guess that having read the novel, Rumi wanting to keep Mina a pure idol didn’t really ring AS true as the obsessive fan who’s got a poisoned view of female sexuality - but I think the film deals with that well by having Rumi focused on her own failures to make it as an idol. The novel actually tells us that Rumi was pretty enough and talented enough but lacked the IT factor - to come so close and run the gauntlet of the brutal idol training, you know she’s going to be extremely angry at someone whose success despite moving away from a pure idol image must seem undeserved in comparison.

On that note, the visual similarities between Rumi & the obsessed fan didn’t make much sense initially, but I guess it depends whose eyes we’re seeing through? Rumi looks like a normal woman most of the film but only when she’s exposed fully do the wide set eyes and drooling mirror the fan.

There is the scene at the beginning where Rumi & the manager argue over Mina’s career direction while she sits there and stares at the table, and by the end of the film she’s a successful actress living and operating independently. Hopefully she managed to work out how to use the internet in between all that. But it spoke volumes about how childish she was encouraged to be and how helpless they left her - right up until someone checked the books and realised the idol group wasn’t actually making much money.

Also, I would love to watch Double Bind.

never heard of this, but these images alone make it look fantastic

Adore this film, went to a cinema screening in 2022 and it was brilliant, especially the reactions from people in the audience who hadn't seen it before. I've never been sure about the ending reveal, I have to admit (so was that Rumi who appeared onstage with the two remaining Cham members, hence their confusion?). Apparently there was a lot of shows like Double Bind on Japanese TV in the 90s, after Silence of the Lambs was a huge success there.

I love the whole tone and feel of the movie, and (this goes without saying) Kon being no longer with us still hurts.

Yeah I think so, idols are unflappable pros (see the start of the film where Mina dodges a can thrown at her without even flinching, which hints that this happens a lot) so they were trained to keep going through it lest they fracture the audience’s image of them.

a movie that i’ve seen thousands of times since i first saw it in high school but only gets better and truer every time i see it. a movie about being a woman and being subject to *everyone’s* projections, never permitted to just be without some kind of expectation distorting your relationship to yourself. a movie that *gets* and *portrays with utter verisimilitude* the experience of the late-‘90s internet. just… yeah

So, so good. My bf does sporadic film nights at one of the local independent cinemas and he's done almost all of the Satoshi Kon films now. The theme of fractured psyche/identity is all-pervading.

the music in this is incredible

Yes! I had to check b/c Susumu Hirasawa of P-Model does a lot of Kon's soundtracks but this one isn't, it's Masahiro Ikumi. Still bloody great.

Coincidentally Rio cinema in Hackney are screening it this Saturday. Might go.

Do it!

Watched it yesterday. There was a great half hour stretch just before the reveal where the main character is carrying with the acting on the TV show (loved how no one seemed to be investigating these murders lol), and her time and space seem to be collapsing due to the stalking and general pressures...but in the end she is seemingly crawling to the finish, acting and working from day to day with no support, culminating in the moment where all stand in applause.

Making art seemed to be intensely exploitative work, that people do despite putting up with an awful lot, and even more so as a woman.

This film pairs with inland empire in my head, I’m a fan obv. Got to see it in the cinema a couple of years ago, my first time since late 90s/early 00s

So fortunate to have seen this in 35mm in 1998 with my father at the Laemmle Santa Monica. It never screens in celluloid anymore, sadly