Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed. – Charles Caleb Colton
It begins at the end.
A woman, dressed in a space suit, hurries toward the entry to a large spacecraft that is prepped for launch. A man, similarly clad, tries to stop her, but, she insists she must keep her promise. She takes her place in the pilot’s chair as the craft it lumbers toward lifts-off.
The shot widens and we realize the shaking of the craft has been overtaken by the shaking of the earth, as experienced inside of a small video editing studio. Books, lamps, and other electrical equipment tumble to the ground under the power of the quake. The dramatic sequence that opened the film is itself a film and, after the quake subsides, the video is set to rewind, previewing the film that we are now ready to see in reverse before the shot fades into the title credits.
Japanese director Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress is an animated film unlike any other. Kon was only able to complete four feature-length films and one brief television series before his life was cut tragically short by pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of forty-seven. But in that body of work, we still find a conceptually ambitious director and animator who pushed not only the known boundaries of anime, not just the medium of film but the limits of storytelling itself. Though his corpus demands study as a whole to appreciate the range of his achievements, Millennium Actress stands ably as a measure of his ambitions and talents, as well as a survey of the themes that dominated his work.
Millennium Actress is a film about time. The film’s titular actress is Chiyoko Fujiwara (Miyoko Shōji), the elusive subject of a documentary being undertaken by director Genya Tachibana (Shōzō Iizuka). After years of searching, Tachibana has secured an interview with his idol, who has not appeared publicly in decades. As we discover later in the film, he has been seeking an audience with her since her reclusion in order to resolve a mystery to which she alone holds the answer and has built his career around that obsession. With his unimpressed cinematographer, Kyoji Ida (Masaya Onosaka), in tow, they go to her house to record her memories of working for a legacy studio, Ginei, that has gone bankrupt and its facilities, destroyed. The perceived span of time that the film covers is one day, as Tachibana interviews his subject.
After the filmmakers arrive at her home, Tachibana gives Fujiwara a key that he knows is of great importance to her but does not know why. The key unlocks the flood of her memories and we are transported into these recollections that ultimately reveal the significance of the key. Kon keeps the movie rooted in the present by having Tachibana and Ida appear in her flashbacks, documenting them with the camera and meta-fictional commentary. Towards the end of her first flashback, her personal narrative and the narrative of famous roles that she played begin to blur. Tachibana, who has memorized every film in which she played, navigates these liminal spaces between fantasy and recollection, even assuming pivotal roles in reenactments of famous scenes from her films, which themselves mirror landmarks of Japanese cinema. Ida, in contrast, stands in for the viewer to remark upon the surreality of this fictional autofiction and, indeed, his own existence within it. As Chiyoko unspools the story of her life as an actor and as a woman, time moves at uneven speeds, burning through entire decades of films in which she appeared before slowing down to life speed at important moments in her life. The perceived span of time of her narrative begins with a pivotal encounter as a young woman with a dissident artist in the 1930s up to the present time, roughly 65 years.
Kon never lets the audience settle for long as he alternates between the accelerator and the emergency brake on this breakneck journey, only pausing to capture the important moments that give the film its unwavering sense of humanity. After Fujiwara’s first film, which is set in a time contemporary to her debut, her development as an actress is captured in period films that begin in Japan’s Heian period (roughly 800 CE) and move incrementally forward across the intervening one thousand years, referencing Japanese cinematic icons as disparate as Akira Kurosawa and Gojira along the way.
Kon meticulously assembles these narrative devices to frame his sculpture of time in motion. The interview of a single day turns inside memories that span a lifetime of films that, in turn, span a millennium, all presented to the audience within the 87-minute running time of the movie. If that was all the film was, a structuralist experiment in asymmetrical flows of time, it would have been a remarkable technical achievement and worthy of study on that basis alone.
But, Millennium Actress is, at its core, a story of profound human emotion. A story of two accidental lovers separated by time and each holding a single piece of the mystery that binds their lives together. With his clockwork structure firmly in place, Kon delivers a story of profound hope in the face of social upheaval and perhaps even the intervening hand of fate, that is measured in the moments where his time-tossed lovers intersect.
While her mother argues with the director who has scouted the young Fujiwara for his next (and her first) film, Chiyoko goes out into the street to throw snowballs at a propaganda poster to vent her frustrations. It is a fitting backdrop for what happens next as a young painter, bloodied from a run in with the police, bumps into her, knocking her down into the snow. Despite his desperate straits, he takes the time to help her up and she impulsively decides to hide him in the family’s food pantry after sending the police on a wild goose chase. Together, they share an innocent but portentous moment that sets the rest of the film’s plot into motion. He has chosen the wrong era in history to be driven by his artistic impulses rather than the fervent nationalism that has seized Japan. Longing only to return to his native Hokkaido to complete one last painting of its wintry landscape, he is being pursued for his involvement with unsavory political movements. When she notices a key around his neck, he gives it to her as a show of affection, telling her only that it opens “the most important thing there is.”
This scene also holds an important key for viewers as it inverts Kon’s structural conceit of juxtaposing various tempos of time flow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPfUo5TJlEw
CHIYOKO: The full moon…
PAINTER: Not until tomorrow. But I like this moon best. After the full moon, it starts to wane. But with the fourteenth moon, there’s still tomorrow…and hope.
Chiyoko and her memory of the artist become trapped in time. Though she inhabits a body that makes films, gets arrested, survives the Second World War and eventually gets married, it is her authentic self, her frozen self, who drives her decision-making process in hopes of someday reuniting with her lost love and, together, witness the full moon.
Many years later, as Chiyoko is filming the sequence that makes up Millennium Actress’s opening (and closing) sequence, an earthquake strikes the studio. Tachibana, who is a low-level production assistant on the project, pulls her from the wreckage and is left holding the key as Chiyoko flees the studio, never to return. Recalling the incident later, Chiyoko admits that when she saw her own reflection after the incident, she realized that her artist would no longer recognize her as the girl in the pantry as she no longer recognized herself. In that moment, Chiyoko becomes unstuck and Tachibana takes her place. While she is free to live the intervening decades without the burden of her obsession, Tachibana carries the key along with the compulsion to solve the mystery it represents until the pair reunites on the day whose span is the tapestry on which this multigenerational saga is woven.
To make a movie about time, Kon chooses to put it through its paces and give the audience the opportunity to observe its flow, across different spans, at different tempos, and even frozen, in order to understand it not through explanation but experientially. The resounding takeaway is that, despite its furious linear aspect characterized by a vector pointing only towards oblivion, time is a circle. Within the vortices that connect the beginning to the end, those who are willing to hope, willing to love can experience, if but for a moment, a sublimation in the eternal. It is clear by the film’s end, which is its beginning, that Kon would have us believe that these are the moments that can cultivate meaning in a life otherwise defined by upheaval, profound suffering, and loss.
Or, as Chiyoko would say:
