CHRIS KNIPP'S SFIFF COVERAGE ON FILMLEAF HERE.



Nobody feels

Joon-ho Bong's contribution to the trilogy film Tokyo! was about one of Tokyo's hikikomori, radical isolates who carry Japanese shyness to an extreme and refuse ever to go outside. We've also seen Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, which shows a young man whose significant other is a lifesize sex toy and whose family goes along with the fiction that "she" is real. Now we have Koreeda's Air Doll (Kûki ningyô) , which in a sense blends elements of both these stories. Hideo (Itsuji Itao) is a waiter living in a miserable industrial suburb who comes home every day to Nozomi, his lovely wife whom he bathes, has sex with, serves dinner to, chats with, and says goodbye to every morning. Nozomi is an inflatable doll. However Nozomi has a secret life of her own in the film, which is exquisitely filmed by Taiwonese cinematographer Mark Lee but succeeds more visually than otherwise. She comes to life after Hideo leaves, morphing into a real woman (played by Korean actress Bae Du-na of The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) who displays a sweet, innocent enthusiasm for the world. Unlike Bong's hiddomori episode or Lars, this film is a fairy tale rather than social and psychological study, and at times it becomes preachy, or slips into the realms of the sentimental or the obvious. A fundamental weakness of the concept is that when the air doll goes out into the world, she is played by a real live actress and no longer seems like an air doll, despite wide-eyed looks and jerky movements.

Koreeda (After Life, Nobody Knows) has excelled in spinning out wafer-thin subjects about love, loss, and loneliness into compelling films. Here, working from a 20-page graphic short story published in 2000 by manga artist Yoshiie Gouda, he takes the material further than it is quite capable of going. For the Japanese audience the film may have more meaning, playing successfully as it does with the culture's fascination with cuteness, its predilection for extremes of politesse, and for imitation and mimicry -- and, needless to say, the passive role of women. And there is delicacy here, even though it risks being cloying, and there are thought-provoking moments, despite the didacticism.

Nozomi goes out into the neighborhood and develops a life of her own, getting a job at a video shop (a showcase of the make-believe that teaches her about the world) , meeting her maker, discovering she has a heart and falling in love with another man, the young shop clerk, Junichi (Arata), and developing a friendship with a crippled poet, while still returning to perform her passive duties for Hideo. Eventually her two separate lives become incompatible.

The material is fragile and seems the more so from being spun out too long, into nearly two hours. Air Doll would be better, and have more chance of an international life outside festivals, if radically cut, relieved of the many repetitious physical sequences and a lot of the gratuitous philosophizing. It has a nice electronic score, a fearless performance by Bae Du-na, good use of its old neighborhood overrun by ugly rebuilding, many subsidiary characters that rarely develop three dimensions. Perhaps it is best that no one competes with the manikin subject.

Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010. Included in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Festival, 2009. To be released in the US by Palisades Pictures, presumably direct to DVD.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.