Perfect Blue is a 1997 Japanese anime psycho-sexual thriller directed by Satoshi Kon.
This is the story of Mima. Mina is a pop idol, a member of a J-pop girl group called CHAM. They are moderately popular but have never quite made the big time. Mima feels she’s going nowhere and decides to make a major career change, quitting CHAM to try to establish herself as a serious actress. We’re already getting a glimpse of one of the movie’s major themes, as Mima has decided to abandon one artificial role in order to take on another role that is equally artificial.
She lands a role in a TV crime drama called Double Bind. It’s an amazingly lurid series focusing on a cop and a psychiatrist investigating sex murders. We see lots of clips of Double Bind and I’m inclined to doubt whether such a sleazy series could ever in reality have been screened on television in Japan (or anywhere else) in the 90s. But that’s not a flaw in the script for Perfect Blue since this is not a movie about reality.
Mima’s acting career progresses slowly but she does start to make a bit of a name for herself. She is a minor celebrity (just as she was a minor celebrity as a singer in CHAM). She supplements her income by doing nude modelling.
Her character in Double Bind undergoes a personality crisis after being raped. Mima’s own personality seems to be unravelling at the same time. She keeps seeing herself, but is it her?
Then people associated with the Double Bind TV series start getting murdered.
Mima has already acquired an internet stalker who posts things about her on the net. His website is called Mima’s Room. She is concerned that he seems to know an awful lot about her. It crosses her mind that he may in fact be watching Mima’s real room, in her apartment.
The lines between reality and fantasy become more and more blurred, for both Mima and the viewer of Perfect Blue. There are multiple levels of reality – the real world, the artificial reality of the entertainment world, the world of the Double Bind TV series, the world of celebrity culture, the internet and the world of Mima’s fantasies or dreams or illusions. Assuming that they’re her fantasies and not somebody else’s. And Mima doesn’t seem to know if any of these worlds corresponds to objective reality. The viewer isn’t sure either.
Mima is so accustomed to playing a part (firstly as the cute squeaky-clean pop idol and later as the sexy actress with a reputation for doing sleaze) that it’s possible that she’s forgotten how to play herself. It’s even possible that she doesn’t really have a self.
But don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t assume that Mima is crazy. This movie is open to various interpretations.
To find out whether Mima finds her way back to any kind of actual reality you’ll have to watch the movie.
It’s interesting that although this movie was made in the very early pre-social media days of the internet it’s extraordinarily prescient about the effects that the internet was about to have on society.
I have seen this movie described as Hitchcockian but apart from the fact that there are hints of voyeurism I don’t see it as being the slightest bit Hitchcockian. There might perhaps be some hints of De Palma.
This is much more of a surrealist film. It’s closer in feel to Jess Franco films like Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968) or Paroxismus (AKA Venus in Furs, 1969) than it is to Hitchcock.
Modern viewers might find the animation style old-fashioned but I think it works, emphasising the unreality and artificiality of everything we’re seeing.
This is certainly an anime for grown-ups. There’s sex and there’s nudity, including frontal nudity. There’s violence.
Perfect Blue is a twisted but somewhat cerebral psycho-sexual thriller about madness, obsession, the nature of reality and the masks people wear and the ways in which the masks can become more real than the people behind them. Highly recommended.
The Shout! Factory steelbook release offers the movie on both Blu-Ray and DVD. The extras include a reasonably interesting interview with Satoshi Kon conducted at the time of the film’s release and a much more interesting lecture delivered by him a decade later to film students. Unfortunately Satoshi Kon’s extremely promising career was cut short by his premature death in 2010.