Mpls./St. Paul International Film Festival: "Air Doll"

Sometimes when you're faced with a multitude of way too many choices at an event like the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, you wind up choosing a film on the basis of the filmmaker, even if the premise isn't something that would otherwise draw you in. Case in point: "Air Doll", the latest work from modern Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda, who has given us such modern classics as "After Life", "Maborosi" and "Nobody Knows". The premise of "Air Doll" seemed so far off center that it was out of the room entirely, but hey, it's Kore-eda. Any new movie about his traditional themes of what truly makes us human and what it means to be alive had to be worthwhile.

"Air Doll" is not only unlike Kore-eda's previous work, it's unlike anything by any other film maker you're likely to have ever seen. In this story, a painfully lonely Japanese executive keeps a life-size inflatable doll that looks exactly like the girlfriend he lost years ago and can't forger. He comes home to his "wife" each night and tells her about his day, etc. But one day, after he's left for work, the doll mysterious comes to life. She's still filled with air inside, but what was plastic now looks exactly like flesh. Instead of telling her "master", she keeps it a secret from him and just goes out into the world, establishing her own job, friends and so on, always making sure to be back home by the time "he" returns. The audience watches the "doll" learning about all the aspects of life that we take for granted but that are shocking and new to her, and gets to ask the usual Kore-eda questions about what makes us what we are (and what we think we are).

Does this sound like an extremely strange film? Oh, yes, it absolutely is. We never get an explanation of how the doll comes to life, it just happens... if you've ever heard of magic realism but weren't quite sure of what it was... just see this movie. But it's a film that's still about the things we're all concerned with and wonder about... it just takes an extremely odd method of addressing them. As you watch the doll begin to learn in awed wonder about the elements of everyday life that we all take for granted, you may start to wonder why you ever lost the sense of wonder about them, because when you stop to think about it they really are full of awe and mystery. There have been any number of films in the past about some character who's innocent of our earthly ways (Jeff Bridges in "Starman", anybody?) who let us see ourselves through other eyes, and this is ultimately just another of those... not that I'm trying to make it sound as if "Air doll" doesn't offer plenty of surprises.

One aspect of the movie bothered me in particular at first: the fact that after the transformation, the doll's former plastic exterior now clearly looks and feels like skin, and the people she meets and works for in the "real world" never doubt that she's human, and yet her "owner" never seems to notice the difference. I knew I was probably looking for realism in the wrong place, but it did bug me. Then someone else pointed this out to me: this is actually a commentary on women's roles in modern society and in some relationships, where as long as a woman is filling her function she isn't really noticed or even "visible" at all. It makes so much sense looking back now, and is one more illustration of why you should probably not take too much of what I say seriously, because you're dealing with a "critic" who couldn't think of that on his own.

But this is by no means nothing but a philosophical movie about the meaning of life or anything like that... it's plenty funny, too. Obviously, somone learning about life from a perspective almost as far-removed as that of an alien from space is going to make plenty of mistakes, and comic advantage is taken of this often enough to keep you laughing. And of course I particularly appreciated that a lot of what she learns about life derives from the movies carried in the video store at which she works, and her progress is made clear by her growing ability to answer questions like "what was the movie adapted from a Stephen King story that starred River Phoenix at age 15?" (It's "Stand By Me", in case you were wondering.)

It isn't as easy to identify the characters in Kore-eda's latest film as it is to identify with those in his others (or most anyone else's), and that might be a slight barrier for some in being able to fully appreciate this film (I'll admit that even I didn't respond to it quite as strongly as I thought I might). Still, there's plenty of amusement and food for philosophical thought in "Air Doll". Wht are we here and what gives our lives meaning? When you're dealing with those kinds of questions, from however unorthodox a perspective, you're not going to be getting a slight, "escapist" movie. Kore-eda doesn't seem to know how to make those. And he also doesn't seem to know how to make films that aren't, at the very least, interesting and thought-provoking.