Millennium Actress

I want to like this movie more than I do. I want to appreciate the movie’s twin themes of a love letter to the history of cinema, and how love, even futile, hopeless, idealized, unrequited love can fuel a life. I want to appreciate how the movie explores the way art and life blend together, especially in memory, and sometimes pulling them apart is impossible. I want to appreciate how it tells the tale of a love never realized, and that the pursuit and hope of it can be as romantic and beautiful as getting it and having it. I want to appreciate all that. But this movie’s central conceit — a retired actress telling her life story and blending it with the roles she’s had — does a lot of damage to my enjoyment of it, for three reasons. One is that, narratively speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever within the content of the movie. The interviewer and cinematographer also seem to travel into her memories/fantasies and play active roles in them. Outside of the narrative, I get that it’s supposed to be a way of blending fantasy and reality, but within the movie’s framework, there must be some logic to it, and the movie never even tried to provide that. It kept me from being able to get into what I was seeing, because it made no contextual sense. The second problem for me is that, narratively speaking, this movie is as barren as the Mojave Desert. I’m sorry, I know I’m supposed to be sucked in by the visuals and the romantic nature, but after seeing this director’s previous movie, Perfect Blue, I was expecting something equally as challenging and deep. I’m not saying I need all my movies to be Mamet plays; I like slashers and Bill & Ted, after all. But if a movie is going to be presented with a high concept like this, it better have the juice behind that concept to back it up. This has all the narrative depth of an after school special. And that leads me to the third problem: the gimmick of this movie IS this movie. It isn’t just reliant on it, it depends on it like life support. So it’s somewhat paradoxical that the gimmick of the blending of life and art only help to underscore the narrative shallowness. If it didn’t have it, the story could be wrapped up in fifteen minutes. With it, you get a full length movie full of intellectual ideas, but it desperately lacks the content to justify being longer than an episode of Full House. I can see from looking at the reviews I’m in a very small group. I’m prepared to be pilloried for this opinion. I can see why people love Millennium Actress. It just didn’t click with me at all. For me, it felt like Christopher Nolan directing a Hallmark movie; a needlessly complex narrative structure in an attempt to obscure a painfully simple story.