Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress (2001)

This is an interesting one, because the narrative of the movie isn't told in a very conventional way. Two interviewers talk with a famous actress, Chiyoko, about her life. It's the story of a young girl who became an actress in hopes of traveling around and finding an rebel who left her a key before fleeing. It's obvious she never actually found him, but the thing that makes this movie interesting is the way in which it is told.

Rather than her simply telling the story, it's being told through a series of scenes from movies she's been in, and any of the scenes being shown have the two interviewers present and reacting as though they actually existed in the scene. Eventually, getting so into her stories, one of the interviewers is actually being shown as one of the other actors in the movie. While there are a variety of reasons to this, the one being presented is simply how into these stories he has been getting. There are a couple things I really like and one thing I don't really like about this setup.

I'll get my nitpick out of the way, and that is while the scenes are all fantastic I feel like they can feel like they keep retreading the same ground multiple times. It just kind of looks like the entire career of Chiyoko has been her getting recast for the same part with a different skin. Somehow every movie she has ever been in involves her looking for a man from her past where some little known by-standard is actually in love her her but chooses to put himself on the line to help her, which is a weirdly specific typecast.

That said the movie is so fun and creative it doesn't really detract that much. The huge variety of scenes being drawn for this movie is outstanding, even though it is telling a very simple story. I love the cuts back to reality where you get to see them become so enveloped in the story being told they are actually speaking to each other as though these events were actively unfolding. There are a lot of questions I found asking myself as the movie played out, and in some ways you could piece together that logically some of this may not make too much sense. At the same time I don't really think that bit matters, I think you are suppose to question how much of this story is reality and how much of it is her romanticizing of the reality. The movie is pretty much the epitome of the saying 'The journey is more important than the destination'.