Air Doll (Kûki ningyô)

Air Doll (Kûki ningyô) (Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda): The premise of Air Doll seems silly at best, sala­cious at worst: an inflat­able sex doll comes to life. In the hands of another dir­ector, the res­ulting film would prob­ably have been a standard sex comedy. But Kore-eda, whose pre­vious TIFF appear­ances have been with thoughtful films like Still Walking and Nobody Knows, turns the film into an abso­lutely cap­tiv­ating med­it­a­tion on what it means to be human.

One morning, Nozomi, a “sex sub­sti­tute”, finds that she has acquired a heart. Puzzled, she dresses her­self in the maid’s outfit her owner has bought for her, and ven­tures out. By mim­icking the speech and actions of her neigh­bours, she learns to fit in, and she soon lands a job working at a video store, where she begins to fall in love with her co-worker. Casting the won­derful Bae Doo Na (Linda Linda Linda, The Host) was a stroke of genius. Her wide-eyed wonder at everything in the world is beau­tiful to watch, and the scenes of her joy­fully dis­cov­ering everything around her put a big smile on my face.

Though she is “owned” by a lonely waiter, he doesn’t realize what has happened and even­tu­ally buys a replace­ment doll. One of the big themes of the film is the idea of sub­sti­tu­tion and replace­ment, that in a big and imper­sonal city like Tokyo, it’s easy to feel unim­portant. Kore-eda assembles a sup­porting cast of neigh­bour­hood char­ac­ters who are all strug­gling with loneli­ness; the old man who sits on the park bench, the single father of a young daughter, the middle-aged hotel clerk wor­ried that a younger woman will soon replace her, the bulimic young woman who refuses to work on her par­ents’ apple farm. Unfortunately, our inter­ac­tions with these char­ac­ters is fleeting, giving a cli­mactic scene near the end a little less impact than I think it should have. As well, a few nar­rative threads are con­fusing which moment­arily pulls us out of this lovely fable.

Bae Doo Na is abso­lutely fear­less in her per­form­ance, whether she’s naked phys­ic­ally or emo­tion­ally. When the joy of dis­covery inev­it­ably gives way to the pain of rejec­tion and “replace­ment,” I was never less than mes­mer­ized by her per­form­ance and her beauty. The film takes a turn for the tragic, as might be expected, but the ending is actu­ally some­what upbeat, and throughout, Kore-eda power­fully reminds us that we are not meant to be alone in this world. Visually beau­tiful and with a beating emo­tional heart, just like Nozomi, Air Doll is def­in­itely a film I’m eager to catch again soon.

(9/10)

Tagged as: #tiff09, japan