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Film Comment Selects 2010: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll cares not for gritty reality but merely the stuff of fairy-tale movies.

Film Comment Selects 2010: Air Doll
Photo: Film Society of Lincoln Center

How fitting that Nozomi (Bae Du-na), a life-size inflatable erotic doll that comes to life, learns about the world while working at a video store, as Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll cares not for gritty reality but merely the stuff of fairy-tale movies, of which Mannequin, Lars and the Real Girl, Pinocchio, and Amélie make up its mushy flesh and bones. Think of it as Sex Toy Story, an insufferably precious saga of humping and magic in which Nozomi awakens one morning to realize, “I found myself with a heart I was not supposed to have,” admires water droplets as “beautiful,” and then secretly abandons the home of her middle-aged owner, Hideo (Itao Itsuji), who recounts his workday to his doll at night before screwing (and then cleaning) her, to discover everything there is to know about everything.

What Nozomi finds out while riding boats, grocery shopping, and being schooled about cinema by a co-worker (Arata) is that people are lonely and don’t see the beauty in the everyday, a condition plaguing a variety of briefly glimpsed caricatures like Boy Jerking Off to Internet Doll Porn and Woman Gorging on Food Inside Garbage-Strewn Apartment. Like Audrey Tautou’s Amélie, Nozomi—replete with visible plastic seams and a belly button air nozzle—perceives life’s wonders with pure, childlike eyes, determining that “having a heart was heartbreaking” and coming to understand such concepts as love, togetherness, and death.

Utilizing muted, twinkly music and graceful pans that want to convey exploratory wonder but feel aimless, Kore-eda positions this fantasy as an address of male sexual attitudes toward women, since Hideo doesn’t even comprehend that Nozomi has become real even after her transformation. Also targeted, thouht, is the clichéd “lonely urban condition,” with Nozomi having an influence on all those similarly “empty” lost souls she meets along her journey.

Neither aim, alas, is treated with anything more than superficial seriousness, as Kore-eda’s interest in desire and longing is habitually channeled through quirky and quick brushstrokes that reduce the already borderline-pretentious proceedings into full-blown treacle. The affectation of the film’s faux-melancholy and counterfeit profundity is enough to make one gaseous, especially as the story winds down to a finale in which Nozomi comes face to face with mortality—first someone else’s, and then her own via—spoiler alert!—a deathbed dream involving her eating food and having everyone sing her “Happy Birthday.”

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Living is sad and dying is happy, Nozomi ultimately gathers, all while a young girl who loves The Little Mermaid leaves Nozomi a toy doll and yet another alienated nobody looks down at Nozomi’s thrown-out corpse and muses “beautiful,” thereby completing Kore-eda’s circle-of-life rumination on the inherent joy and misery of human existence. You could say, then, that the director’s hot-air film at least perfectly captures the latter facet.

Film Comment Selects runs from February 19—March 4.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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