Perfect Blue

Image source: animebottle.com

I wouldn't go into the Perfect Blue-is-just-another-sex-and-gore-anime-so-any-feminist-concept-it-carries-is-not-worth-noting-down. Because I'm biased. I liked it. And sometimes you have to exploit to show exploitation. And well, another excuse I can think of is it is consistent with the style of the whole film. Show psychological issues by being all confusing by itself. So showing exploitation by exploiting in itself is not really surprising. But that's just another excuse. Basically, I just liked it.

Perfect Blue cleanly executes the downwards spiral into psychological confusion. How the film accelerates into breath-taking scenes is dependent on the development of the protagonists, or rather, on the speed of their psychological breakdowns.

The film is about Mima who left her pop idol girl group at the direction of her agency. Because she has a potential to be a wonderful actress, they say, and that pop idols don't really go anywhere in Japan. This change in her career stirs the wrath of an obsessed fan, who writes too much details of her daily life on a website. The website is written in the style as if Mima's the one who's really writing it, except the Mima on the website, of course, is not afraid to say that she doesn't really want to be an actress.

With the pressures of doing drastic work as an exploited actress─gang-rape scenes and nude modeling for instance─Mima starts reading the anti-Mima actress website religiously and starts questioning her identity.

Everyone tells Mima what to do and who she should be. Either she's a slutty actress or an innocent pop idol. Note that both statuses are exploited anyway. Perfect Blue does a good job of showing how women put on pedestals are torn between both the exploited virgin/whore dichotomy. It also does a good job of how it affects them. Most of the time, Mima is not sure what she wants anymore. Also, everyone acts as if reality only presents two places for her, which at the end of it all, is a place a human being shouldn't have to be in.

8/10