Screened at Melbourne International Film Festival 2010.

It is a beautiful morning in Tokyo trough the eyes of Nozomi, an Air Doll (sex doll) who has magically come to life. Everyday when his pervert owner leaves to work, she explores the city and we follow her day to day encounters with strangers and her attempts to look and behave more and more like a human being. Eventually she finds a job at a video store and falls in love with one of the clerks. “I found a heart, and now I am brokenhearted”. But soon enough after she starts experiencing real feelings, she discovers the philosophical questions that hunt most of us. Why are we here, where do we come from, what is love ?.

Writer Director Hirokazu Kore-Eda exposes this and more philosophical questions right from the beginning and trough the film, focusing mainly on a strong analogy: Most of humans are also empty inside, are we really that different to a plastic doll ?. This repeating theme on the film creates an interesting premise, but the story lingers for too long without any real conflict until the audience has lost interest on the character, regardless of the fantastic performance of Doona Bae. And some very superb cinematographic moments shoot on the streets of Tokyo. A bit out of the sudden and into the third act the filmmaker twists the film into a very dark down path for the charismatic and innocent character, but it is too late to change genres and what is left at the end although very symbolic and beautiful is an unsatisfactory story.

Philosophical questions about morals, consumerism, plastic lives, love, substitutions, life and death, child’s innocence, loneliness are exemplified by cutting into the lives of other strangers, which most of the time is done with elegant poetry and visuals, but these are edited like a sort of interludes within the film which didn’t help me feel more interested in the film.

I enjoyed the start and the end of the film, it has a great concept, lost of cute moments where you can’t help but smile or sex references that make you gasp, but once I understood what the director was trying to say I wanted less poetry and long shoots and more story that was not delivered. I came out thinking “this could have been a great short film”.

I’ll give it 2.5 stars.

Ivan Tinoco,
July 24, 2010