#5 "Perfect Blue" (1997)

"Excuse me, who are you?"

Mima is a young performer who has decided to retire from being a 'pop idol' in a generic Japanese girl-band to pursue a career as an actress, starting with a role in a serial killer thriller called "Double Bind." Although she is excited to begin her new life, Mima is conflicted about letting go of her 'wholesome' girl-band persona to play her new role as a sexually traumatized young woman. Not only that, but some of Mima's most committed fans feel personally betrayed by her daring to behave like anything other than her carefully and commercially crafted public image. Soon Mima starts receiving threatening notes and those threats escalate from creepy to menacing to violently real.

Director Satoshi Kon's first feature, "Perfect Blue" is a psychosexual thriller about a young woman having a terrifying identity crisis while starring in a psychosexual thriller about a young woman having a terrifying identity crisis. This is a thematically dense and self-aware film, packed with great, disturbing ideas and cinematic moments that skilfully capture them in a tightly plotted 80 minutes.

While it's easy to imagine Brian De Palma taking on this material (even this script) and making it into a smarmily self-referential piece of faux-Hitchock, Kon's vision and realization are much more sincere. Mima is a likeable, three-dimensional character trying to escape the confines of a strictly two-dimensional image created by a culture of fandom that wants her to be cutely sexy but not actually sexual. Through Mima's subjectivity, Kon takes us into a hall of mirrors where we are often unsure moment-by-moment of whether we're looking at reality, fantasy, dream of performance.

Before making "Black Swan," Darren Aaronofsky bought the remake rights to "Perfect Blue," specifically so he could copy the sequence of terrorized protagonist Mima in the bathtub, trying to collect herself as her grasp on reality gets shakier and shakier. It's not hard to see that there are many other parallels between "Black Swan" and "Perfect Blue" as each is rich in themes of duality and identity struggle: image and reality, performer and performance, the binary cultural divide between 'maiden' and 'whore.'

"Perfect Blue" doesn't have the kind of eye-poppingly seamless animation of "Paprika," but it still looks gorgeous, particularly whenever we're in close-up with Mima. The film is sometimes a little heavy-handed with its themes, but Kon's vision is meticulous, disturbing and beautiful.