E-Mail This Article to a Friend MILLENNIUM ACTRESS

In Satoshi Kon’s 2001 anime, a retired movie star grants a documentary-film crew an interview. As she speaks, the black-and-white flashbacks of her youth turn to color, and the action, shifting from past to farther past to present, acquires the dramatic sweep of an epic. Chiyoko’s life and films intertwine as she, like the great characters she plays, searches for an elusive man she fell in love with as a schoolgirl.

Time and reality are effortlessly fluid in this beautiful rarity, an animated film for adults. Chiyoko’s roles reflect the different eras of Japanese culture; her films span the changing styles of Japanese cinema, from Mizoguchi to Godzilla. She fights an army of bandits, only to switch without warning to a different version of her film life where she is a geisha in love with a penniless rebel. As the tension in her story mounts, the documentary crew members begin to participate, interacting and eventually becoming characters in her past. As a meditation on the nature of truth and reality, film and fact, Millennium Actress is moving; as entertainment, it’s as exhilarating as any live-action film. In Japanese with English subtitles. (87 minutes