Perfect Blue (1997)

Director Satashi Kon’s first feature is old enough now (25 years!) that, in the story, the internet is still a novelty that must be explained to people. The story concerns a singer who is successful in a J-pop singing trio. She decides under influence of ambition to break away from the singing she has been trained for (against the advice of some in her management) and try her luck at an acting career. The movie is even too old to be about Destiny’s Child and Beyonce, let alone Lady Gaga, but it’s a classic story, with old roots and echoes of A Star Is Born. Or maybe Phantom of the Opera in a kind of sideways manner. Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao) is stalked by an obsessive fan, forced to do sexualized scenes as an actor, and haunted by an image of herself as a pop singer who shows up and taunts her. It’s a thin line, as the old song goes, between love and hate, but in this movie it’s also a thin line between reality and hallucination. Mima is breaking down in front of us but she has other problems as well. In addition, Kon has a strange way of telling a story, which would be more perfected in Paprika, from 2006, as well as a 2004 TV miniseries, Paranoia Agent. I didn’t get a lot out of the various backstage dramatics in Perfect Blue, which are never very original, nor out of the tensions of the stalking thread either, which is more merely pro forma. Kon’s strange narrative style, however—somewhat in the manner of manga, with surprising tactics and approaches—is both engaging and intriguing and keeps everything moving along at good pace. Perfect Blue is also geared to work at the level of horror, earning an R rating with surprisingly graphic scenes of violence and fetishy sexualizing of its main character in somewhat wanton and unpleasant ways. It all serves the story, little here feels gratuitous, but Mima’s hard life is never shrunk away from and not easy to watch, even if she is supposed to be a glamorous star of pop music and, later, TV and film. Perfect Blue flirts with cliché in any number of ways but has many hooks to counter that. It is always strange and interesting, if slightly underdone. Paprika and Paranoia Agent remain the go-to work in Kon’s sadly abbreviated career but Perfect Blue, with its connections to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream and to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” remains worth a look.