• 空気人形 (Air Doll)

6/30/24 (Sun)

Koreeda’s 2009 flick, an oddity in his ouevre, is on the surface about the life and death of a blowup sex doll. But it proves much more than that. (Air Doll is a literal translation of the Japanese title. Trivia: non-inflatable plastic sex dolls in Japan are known as Dutch wives, which my American friend never tired of mentioning to his Dutch wife.)

When we first meet the title character, she is a lifeless sex toy owned by a kind but lonely restaurant worker, who has named her Nozomi (meaning “hope”). He coddles her, discusses his day with her, takes her outdoors on strolls in a wheelchair, and of course has sex with her, carefully washing out her plastic vagina when finished.

One day, she magically comes to life. Sneaking out of the house, she looks at the world with a sense of wonder – raindrops, flowers, skyline, city streets, people – and picks up the language through observation (à la the mermaid in Splash). She even manages to get a part-time job in a DVD rental shop, where she becomes friendly with her handsome coworker. She rushes home each evening before her owner returns from work, continuing to act as an inert object for his benefit – i.e., a working female by day, a doll by night. At one point, she falls and cuts herself at the shop, releasing the air from her body and leaving her literally deflated. Her coworker blows her back up through her navel in a sexually charged scene.

One evening, she comes home late and finds her owner with a new doll. Having thought that she was gone, he had replaced her, and is surprised to see that she has returned and come to life. He was happier with a plastic item on which he could project his own fantasies and rejects the human that she has become. She runs off in tears and pledges herself to her coworker. She assents to his odd request to deflate her and breathe air back in, which he repeats several times. When she tries to return the favor, she cuts what she thinks is an air hole, only to accidently murder him. She disposes him with the garbage, the fate of all dolls, then sits and allows her own air to flow out. As she waits to be picked up with the other garbage, she has visions of all the people that she has encountered in her brief human life. As she said earlier, “Having a heart was heartbreaking.”

A meditation on isolation and loneliness. The people shown in passing – e.g., the doll’s owner, the woman eating her bento alone, the old man, the DVD shop manager – are all individuals longing for connection. The doll with nothing but air inside is a bit obvious as a symbol, but that doesn’t make it any the less effective. The DVD store itself represents a virtual or unreal medium through which people experience a copy of life rather than the real thing. As Nozomi notes, “It’s not enough for flowers to have pistils and stamens; an insect or a breeze must introduce a pistil to a stamen. Life contains its own absence, which only another can fill.”

Koreeda’s steady hand is evident throughout in the film’s calm pacing and lack of theatrics. The doll’s sudden awakening is quite rightly left unexplained (I thought of the boy’s transformation in Big), and her actions are largely natural despite the fantasy setting. Koreeda benefited immensely from the presence of Korean actress Bae Doona, who managed adeptly to evoke the doll’s innocent, wide-eyed intake of the world without tipping over into sentimentality or cutesiness. She walked a fine line in breathing life into a difficult character and was easily the film’s biggest single asset on the acting side. I’ve seen overwrought reviews trying to make some connection with Korean comfort women or her status as an outsider in Japan, but I suspect she was hired for her acting ability rather than her nationality (she worked with Koreeda again later in his Korean-language Baby Broker); the film seems to be aiming at a more universal theme. Comedian Itao Itsuji also presented a sympathetic picture as the put-upon waiter and Nozomi’s owner, who was happier loving a pretend-person than dealing with life in all its complexity. I found his matter-of-fact portrayal of his solitary life very moving.

The subtitles were generally fine, though I might have been more creative with the title (which sounds misleadingly close to “airhead”). The girl’s line on a visit to the doll factory, 生んでくれてありがとう, is translated as “Thank you for having me”, which sounds like he invited her over; it is probably better rendered as “Thank you for giving birth to me.”

The movie could be tightened somewhat, but watching all the lonely people in this Eleanor Rigby world was poignant and beautiful. I watched the quirky piece only because of the director’s reputation and didn’t expect to like it. But I did very much. A lovely work.