It’s charming and sweet – at times it teeters on the edge of sentimentality – but at its heart it’s a bleak film about loneliness, and the attempt to connect meaningfully with other human beings in a world which seems designed to counter such efforts.Īs the film opens, we meet Nozomi’s ‘owner’, Hideo (a magnificent performance by Itsuju Itao) a put-upon, isolated middle-aged loner, as he makes his way home from work, stopping to buy fancy shampoo – as it turns out, for his sex doll. The film documents her attempts to understand her surroundings and find her way among her fellow humans. The story itself is simple one day, for reasons that are never explained (although the randomness is itself part of the story’s raison d’etre), a cheap inflatable sex doll named Nozomi (Doona Bae from The Host and Cloud Atlas) comes to life.
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Aided by a beautifully wistful soundtrack by World’s End Girlfriend (Katsuhiko Maeda), the film, despite some comedic – and a few horrific – elements, is essentially a two-hour sigh. But there are more complex psychological implications to the story, especially in essentially monotheistic modern cultures, and they have been explored in books and films as wide-ranging as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Carlo Collodi’s (and Walt Disney’s) Pinocchio, Blade Runner and – not least, Hirokazu Koreeda’s often overlooked Air Doll (2009).īased on the manga by Yoshiie Gōda and beautifully filmed by noted Taiwanese cinematographer Ping Bin Lee ( In the Mood for Love, Norwegian Wood), the film uses less familiar, down at the heels residential areas of Tokyo as the key locations for what feels at times like a bittersweet fairytale. Normally in cinema, versions of the myth have also been simple and somewhat misogynistic and have been played mostly for laughs as in Mannequin or Weird Science. The couple are married and have children and – uncharacteristically for Greek mythology, that is that.
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As Ovid told it, it’s simple and straightforwardly misogynistic the sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted with the state of womankind, carves a ‘perfect’ woman from ivory, who is then brought to life by Aphrodite. There’s a lot of creative mileage in the Pygmalion myth.