Title: Air Doll aka Kuuki Ningyo
Genre: Drama
Director: Koreeda Hirokazu
Format: Movie; 125 minutes.
Dates: 14 May 2009

Synopsis: In the pouring rain, Hideo, a middle aged man, rushes home, regretting the fact that he didn’t bring an umbrella.  Once home, he starts conversing over dinner with his girlfriend, Nozomi… who is in fact a blow-up doll.  After dinner, they go upstairs to have sex.  The next day, after Hideo goes off to work, Nozomi comes to life.  Dressed in a maid outfit, she goes outside to explore the wider world.

The Highlights
Pacing: Slow and uneven for the first half, but finds a better tempo during the second.
Themes: Looks at existence and the utility of sex, but is dulled by its nihilistic bent.
Sex scenes: Disturbing, almost harrowing.
Script: Too unfocused; too many unnecessary characters.
Music: The soundtrack from world’s end girlfriend is somber and tender; melancholic.
Acting: A brave, praise-worthy performance from Bae Doona.

I sometimes find myself having a strange sympathy for sex dolls.  No wait, hear me out.  There is something rather lonely and utilitarian about their existence… an utterly unromantic substitution for the romantic void in people’s lives.  There have been a few scattered movies and TV shows that have dealt with the topic, like Lars and the Real Girl or The Tatami Galaxy, and these tend to be surprisingly sweet when the sex is jettisoned for a strangely innocent, if misdirected, love.  Air Doll isn’t quite as innocent.  It has moments of sweetness, but these are embedded within the depressing, isolated, nihilistic world that Nozomi, a blow-up doll come to life, explores.  I felt some sympathy for Nozomi, but significantly stronger than that, I felt disgust at the people that use her.

There’s a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required by the premise, which partly explains the unevenness of the first half of the movie.  Nozomi’s development is awkward, which is justified considering her first exposure to the world is unguided and happens in a completely different order to that of a child’s.  On one hand, it’s endearing to see how she naively and innocently processes what she sees… on the other hand, it can be a bit difficult to buy that she can barely string two words together during her first outing, but soon after she has a job sorting DVDs at a video store.  But what particularly strikes me as weird are her moments of existential introspection.  She speaks of the emptiness of people and their need to interact with others to be fulfilled, but does so at a point in the film where she’s had no experiences that justify her assertions.  Speeches like this would have been better placed at the end of the film, rather than through the first act.

The sex scenes are disturbing (and it wouldn’t have made any sense if they weren’t).  The first one, which takes place towards the beginning of the film, before Nozomi comes to life, is particularly unsettling to watch because of the repeating sound of skin rubbing against plastic and the clean up job afterwards.  The contrast between Nozomi’s innocence of the world and her utility as a sexual device is one of the more harrowing and resonant points that the movie makes… in one scene, an ailing old man asks Nozomi to touch him, and her first impulse is to consider the request as sexual.  The other major theme of the film is loneliness, which drive a lot of the darker interactions with Nozomi, as the people who “use” her do so to replace something that they’ve lost.

Air Doll has some good ideas and courageously explores some tough themes about sex, relationships, loneliness and existence, but it also suffers from being unfocused.  There were a number of characters and a couple of subplots that didn’t contribute and went no where, such as the young man that lived in squalor, the middle-aged woman worried about her age and the family murder introduced early on.  But what didn’t sit well with me was the nihilism of the whole exercise.  Sure, Nozomi met some good people, but they were few and their interactions with Nozomi were, with one exception, brief.  The ending is particularly depressing and, as far as I can see, meaningless and empty.  Perhaps this is the irony that the movie intended, but it doesn’t have much positive to say about Nozomi’s existence.

Air Doll is a sad and sentimental film that uncomfortably contrasts sex and innocence.  However, its script is scattered and it has a nihilistic bent which not only makes it unpleasant viewing, but also serves to dull its sentimentalism.  When Nozomi is asked if she saw anything in this world that was beautiful, she answers “yes”.  After the film is over, it’s hard to remember what she was referring to.

The Rating: 6

Reviewed by: Sorrow-kun