18 - Paprika (2006)

Back. The annual aniversary occasion seemed like a good moment to try a comeback, although I don't estimate frequent entries for the upcoming months. During this one year break I've watched some movies, not so many as back in the early blog days, but there were some titles good enough for this occasion:

• "Conclave" - probably the best movie as "full package" seen over last year
• "Mickey 17" - very underrated
• "Straume" - just in case somebody thinks a movie can't work without having dialogue in it
• "Bugonia" - the Lanthimos/Stone tandem still works, new episode, sufficiently different from the previous to counter some criticism on increasing monotony in the collaboration
• "La sociedad de la nieve" - hard to watch, but it's worth it
• "The Brutalist" - a bit too long, but it's worth it
• "Anora" - good, but slips towards guilty pleasure
• "Companion" - was expecting a guilty pleasure, but good
• "Alien: Romulus" - surprisingly good, above Fincher and Jeunet's iterations, below Scott and Cameron, practically the best comeback of the series since '86
• "Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" - "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" of 20 years ago is probably more funny (damn, I'm old), but this gets close to it
• "The Accountant 2" - not as good as the first one, but still sufficiently original to move out from the classic action pattern

and there are others too. However, I picked something older for today's entry, "Paprika", probably not as good as many of the above. However, it's the last I watched, and by a strange multi-layered coincidence it really got to me. Among its layers there's a metaphor of cinema as a "reality escape" equivalent to dreams = got synced well with a blog revival.

The movie is the last anime of the 4 produced by Satoshi Kon during his short time span in this world. I've heard about these, but not being very into the genre I kept ignoring them. Until three days ago, since when I've seen the current one in split pieces. Initially, it didn't catch me enough to see it to the end, but still, finally reaching its end after a second break, I understood why I didn't give up. Let's get a bit into the subject: in a not so far future, DC Mini, a new device invented in a research institute permits connecting to a person's dreams. The action revolves among several characters, mostly the employees of the respective institute, among whom a psychiatrist takes advantage of the device to interact with her patients, via an alter ego: Paprika, and in particular with one patient, a policeman plagued with isomnia and haunted by recurrent dreams. The story gets complicated when the DC Mini prototype gets stolen, and as consequence an increasing number of victims starts popping up, manifesting a strange behavior, where the dream dominates the reality. Further, the action revolves against investigating the theft, but more details would result in spoilers, so let's stop here with the story.

"Paprika" has a literary basis, and it's often referenced as an inspiration source for "Inception". I wouldn't say that is more present there than P.K. Dick's "Ubiq". Indeed, there is a common theme of "dream access", which is central in "Paprika", but we have a different story, with a completely different meaning. A story for which its development convinced me that chaotically nuanced surrealism it's not something specific for Hayao Miyazaki + Studio Ghibli in Japanese animes, because we have plenty of it here too. And that's the minus, which at some point makes the movie slightly entangled and hard to follow, not being clear anymore what happens in reality and what in the dream world. Still, finally we get that meaning I was referring to above.

On the plus side, the movie excels technically, at least for an anime. We have scenes that include volumetric nuances to enhance the perspective, a game of lights, and others, very nicely worked out. The editing helps enhancing the impact. We have a soundtrack which cannot get unnoticed, even just for a track that maintains the impression of a chaotic dream with a bunch of harmonic overlaps, where if we extract just the melodic line on a single track, what results is constrastingly calm (see the keys variant below, even though it's with an active reverb/sustain + a high pitch).

That's what the end of the movie gives you. An impression of getting through a rollercoaster, but leaving enough to you to extract whatever metaphor you want from the dream :) = sufficiently complex to interpret by desire. From a balance between live your life vs. regrets to... but I said, no spoilers ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5 ( for the anniversary occasion, otherwise I would've got stuck to 3.5, too much metaphor can be tiring :) )

PS: And still, spoilers :P press play by choice - although that's probably the most obvious metaphor (pretty much what I wrote above):