September Review: Millennium Actress (2001) (Patreon)

Millennium Actress (2001) is a masterful reflection on life, love, and what pushes us through it all. Somehow, a love of cinema makes its way in as well.

Following a documentary team as they interview a reclusive aging actress, Millennium Actress (2001) unfolds as she describes her life, blending events with her on-screen roles. At the center of her story is a key, given by a faceless painter whom she's pursued throughout the different phases of her life. This yearning for a man she has no way to find is what drives her, and by extension, drives this film.

The story of a life can be difficult to tell. Plenty of actors have played a single role through many stages of a character's life, but in these instances there is extra care to make them not look like an older man in young makeup, or vice versa. Millennium Actress (2001) makes the case for telling these types of introspective retrospectives in animation flawlessly. With careful design and fluid motion, characters can waft between costumes and time periods with an ease no real mortal human could. 

Outside of the logical technical issues solved through animation, Millennium Actress (2001) does a flawless job at weaving together the film roles of it's starlet, and her real life. As she tells her story to the interviewer, they join us the audience in watching the events play out, often turning from reality to a scripted performance. The smooth animation is certainly a contributing factor to how fluid this feels, but at it's core, the real success of the film is how driven all the roles, plots, and stories are by one woman's pursuit of love.

At the core of the film is an old woman recounting the one thing that carried her through her life and carrier, and as she expresses this, we see just how it influenced the roles she played. Version after version of the yearning, determined woman grace the screen, and through all of it, the one thing she never loses is the all-consuming desire to find her painter. Her love is not the only faithful, forceful one in motion however, as the documentarian too, pines for the actress, a woman who has enthralled him since he was a young assistant on set. Together, their single-minded drives to find and to protect meld into a strong narrative cable, pulling the audience through the ever-shifting aesthethic of the film. 

Millennium Actress (2001) has a mastery of screen language and narrative that betrays the third and final true love throughout the film, the love of cinema. While what pulls us through is the pursuit our heroine endured, what allows that singular drive to shine is the surrounding exploration of Japanese cinema. Perhaps not as explicitly stated as other elements, a true love for the art of filmmaking permeates the different types of roles, the transitions through time, and the view of the now-decrepit studio. As the actress passes in her hospital bed, climbing into the role of the astronaut one last time to continue her pursuit of her painter, the thing she loved continuing at the end of her life, the audience is forced to confront what they've loved. It isn't any one singular moment, nor plot, but the pursuit of the end. The journey, not the destination.

9 out of 10 Costume Changes