Air Doll (Koreeda, 2009)
I’ve been a Koreeda fan ever since I picked up a VHS tape of Maborosi (1995) from the sale bin of a video outlet. When I started attending the Toronto Film festival, one of the biggest attractions was the ability to score a snake peek at new works of world cinema weeks or even months before they hit American theater. I remember Koreeda standing in the back of the theater after a public screening of Still Walking, thanking the audience for attending. So Air Doll was absolutely one of my can’t miss movies from the 2009 festival. I even mentioned it positively in a festival write-up for Christianity Today, telling readers to look for it when it was finally released in America.
It never was, though. Even after Koreeda gained broader popularity for Shoplifters, Air Doll remained a title from his filmography that was hard to actually get to see. I get it. Its description — a sex doll comes to life — sounds like a porn riff on Frankenstein or a Japanese remake of Lars and the Real Girl. (It’s actually based on a manga, but…) Over a decade later, Dekanalog brings it to limited theatrical release in America before making it available on streaming platforms.
Revisiting the film, I was pleased that it still holds up. As someone who often reviewed for faith outlets, recommending a film with large amounts of sexual content or nudity always risks reader backlash, but very few who object to “R” rated movies are going to be wading into international territory.
Air Doll isn’t really about sex, though. It’s about…loneliness, discovery, identity. It’s about seeing the world through different eyes. If all that sounds vague, I will concede that the episodic structure of the manga lends itself to more beautiful frames/scenarios but doesn’t help provide a cohesive narrative. The Air Doll repeats words that have been whispered to her (“beau-ti-ful”), and they take on new meaning as she applies them to the melting ice or the world she sees rather than always and only making it a bit of puffery with which to describe female bodies.
In the film’s best scene, she discovers the box that she came in, and her expressionless face makes the voice-over all the more poignant. What does it signify that she is a “cheap” model? There is, of course, the gulf between how we talk about women (or women’s bodies) and how we treat them.
Air Doll is not Koreeda’s most powerful film, but it does have quite a few more striking images than I am used to. As I was rewatching, I was surprised to note that while I had forgotten most of the plot, I did remember key scenes and beautiful shots. It is permeated throughout with the auteur’s touch of melancholy, but it also hints that there is light and love in the world around us, sometimes hiding in plain view.
