Friday, March 29, 2024

Movie Review: ‘Air Doll’ is a Flawed But Meditative Exploration of Human Nature


Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu

Writer: Kore-eda Hirokazu, based on the original graphic novel “Gouda’s Philosophical Discourse, The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl” by GOUDA Yoshiie

Stars: Bae Doona, ARATA, Itsuji Itao

Synopsis: A life-size blow-up doll develops a soul and falls in love with a video store clerk.


Kore-eda Hirokazu has an admirable understanding of human nature. In Like Father, Like Son (2013), for example, he explored the stubbornness of clinging to blood ties and the real meaning of family bonds. In Shoplifters (2018), he reflected on the meaning of emotional connections and human emotion, proving that family is not necessarily limited to the one in which you are born. Now, for the first time, his feature film Air Doll (2009) is being released in the United States, 13 years after its original premiere. In this film, Kore-eda plays with the clean slate of a just-born soul to theorize on what makes us human. This fish out of water story allows him to observe different ways of living and bask in the little things that make life equally magical as tragic.  

In Air Doll, Kore-eda mixes sensuality, mundanity, and discomfort by presenting Nozomi (Bae Doona), a sex doll that inhabits an apartment in an old neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan. The doll solely exists to fulfill the physical and emotional needs of her owner Hideo (Itsuji Itao), who converses with and has sex with her. In his loneliness, this lifeless object is his beloved and his home.

One day, this doll comes to life, acquiring a soul. She goes through a period of discovery, as if she were a baby, admiring herself and everything and everyone around her. With her as a vessel, Kore-eda inspires us to focus and revel on the small things. The director allows himself to follow Nozomi as she focuses on the morning dew, a girl running around the block, or the daily routine of those around her. The film is both curious and slow, endearing and patient with its protagonist. Through Nosomi’s eyes everything is unforgettable and awe-inspiring, forcing us to focus our attention on the things, details, and idiosyncrasies that we take for granted and have internalized as unremarkable. 

When Nozomi wakes up, her curiosity drives her outside the apartment and into the streets of Tokyo. Soon enough she arrives at a video store and instantly falls in love with its clerk, Junichi (ARATA). While Hideo is away working, Nozomi builds a life for herself: she wakes up, goes to work to the video store, and explores the city; sometimes alone and sometimes in company of Junichi – who displays an astounding patience and empathy for this clueless woman–, and goes back home to act as lifeless as she was before for a Hideo that is too immersed in his needs to notice her consciousness. 

Kore-eda is interested in offering contrasts, as if wanting us to value the things and experiences that us humans have at our reach and don’t enjoy enough. Through Nozomi’s existence, he unravels the beauty of our mortality and humanity. Given that she can’t eat or age, the director offers peripheral stories that show characters suffering because they are aging or trying to fill a void within themselves through food. While the interconnectedness isn’t organic, the contrasts are unmissable. The things that we shy away from, Nozomi is desperate to experience and understand. There is something endearing and lovable about her human discoveries, only strengthened by Bae Doona’s performance, who is inquisitive, innocent, and captivating.  

Accompanied by a curious and gentle score by World’s End Girlfriend, Nozomi walks around the city learning about life and the complicated bonds that humans share. Her curiosity allows her to enjoy and fear everything in equal measure, contrasting clearly with the boring and disappointing reality of everyone else around her. Just as she starts understanding life, she encounters the best and worst of humanity. In this regard, Kore-eda is willing to be cruel with his main character, surrounding her with vicious men that take advantage of her lack of understanding of social norms and traps. While the men of the story are shaped by malice and abuse, the women are threatened by cruelty and suffering. It seems as if Kore-eda is interested in showing all the facets of life: the ecstatic enjoyment of nature, infatuation and discovery, and the fearful threats of abuse, self-centeredness, and cruelty.

While the film is a mostly gentle and sometimes uncomfortable exploration of humanity, its ending goes through an unexpected change that turns it into a darker and gloomier story than previously anticipated. Kore-eda offers an unstable level of naiveté in Nozomi, sometimes being too innocent and ignorant, and others understandable and insightful. At the end, the film offers a not too optimistic message, which in hindsight, offers a gloomy and realistic conclusion about human existence: curious, expectant and haunting.

 

Grade: B-               

                                                         

 

 

 

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