Perfect Blue

The most transgressive film in town, appropriately confined to midnights at the Coolidge Corner, is Satoshi Kon's animated erotic thriller Perfect Blue, which oozes blood and violence and includes problematic rape sequences. But the movie is pretty exciting, imaginatively drawn stuff, an often startlingly effective terror ride in which poor pop idol Mima "Kitty" Kirigoe is put through the ringer time and again after she leaves her cozy teen singing group and "graduates" to acting before the cameras in a deeply sexual murder mystery. As happens in these kind of paranoid, deranged tales, nightmare and reality, dreaming dreadful things and living them, jumble together. Are people really being stabbed to death? Is our "Kitty" the killer? Or is it a ghostly doppelgänger who looks like Kitty, with a fixed cutesy smile and a Snow White dress? Roger Corman, a fan, has said of Perfect Blue, "If Alfred Hitchcock partnered with Walt Disney, they'd make a picture like this." This Japanese anime is dubbed superbly into English with, I'm glad to report, no movie stars supplying their honey voices.

-- Gerald Peary