Screened at The Alamo Drafthouse
Awe, good old duality. I just rewatched Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) in theaters a couple days ago so this happens to be a more than fitting follow-up to those two.
Headache-giving “is it reality or fiction?” cinema is usually great and Perfect Blue is no exception. I think seeing Satoshi Kon’s debut in this age of social media really emphasizes just how relevant it’ll be even onward: the cancelation of the host of a facade after they sincerely reveal to be more complex or, better yet, the unflattering conditioning of the consumer seeing the celebrity as a human, not just a media appearance. You see it all the time in cancel culture with the amount of repeated shock constantly exhibited when we witness that people with power can be pieces of s**t — wow, who would’ve thought? Kon is clearly interested in this cultural aversion of the idea that humans are multi-faceted. He breaks it down too, making a point with increasingly distorted patterns of either glamorized or normalized settings and events that reveal the struggle of regulating personas in the public environment of individual biases and favoritisms, critical dislikes towards personal evolutions with compulsions towards conservatism of the idol or even instinctive preservation of its innocence. The worlds become scrambled, and therefore a bloating burden to navigate.
Anyways, if you’ve ever wanted to see a movie about the infamous Björk stalker, this is the closest to it that I’ve seen so far. It may be animated, but Perfect Blue feels incredibly real.
Verdict: A-
“Perfect Blue” is now available to rent on Amazon Prime.
Burning the Celluloid 
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