Perfect Blue gives Mima a public self she cannot control

Perfect Blue. Promotional artwork courtesy GKIDS.

Someone is keeping a diary of Mima's life. It sounds like her, notices the details of her day and presents itself as a more reassuring version of the singer she used to be. But Mima is not writing it. Perfect Blue makes the discovery of a website feel like finding that a stranger has moved into your name and knows how to perform it for an audience.

Satoshi Kon's feature debut follows Mima Kirigoe as she leaves a pop group to pursue acting. Some fans resist the change. Her new work asks her to take on performances that unsettle the image they want to preserve. The film puts those competing demands beside a stalker and a series of killings, while making it increasingly difficult to separate Mima's work from what she is experiencing outside it.

Kon explained the website's purpose to interviewer Tom Mes in 2002. He needed somewhere an invented Mima could appear closer to her public image than the real woman could. He chose a site made by someone else, then bought a computer and learned about the internet while making the film. His own website came afterward. The idea grew from a storytelling problem, rather than from years of personal experience online.

That distinction makes the film more precise than a general warning about technology. The diary is frightening because its version of Mima seems to satisfy an expectation she can no longer meet. Every career decision can become evidence, to someone watching, that she has stopped being herself. Kon lets that judgment begin to contaminate her own ability to trust what she remembers.

He also told Mes that the film-within-a-film and the uncertain border between reality and imagination were additions he brought to the adaptation. A scene can appear to give the audience firm ground before another cut changes its meaning. We are left checking where a performance began, who was watching and whether the last image belongs to the same level of the story.

Kon resisted describing Perfect Blue as an exposé of Japan's idol industry. He spoke instead about a young woman becoming confused as an old set of values falls apart. Reading the film beside today's public profiles is one way to approach it, but Mima's immediate problem is already concrete: other people keep insisting they know who she is. The thriller makes that insistence invasive long before it explains who is behind it.