Perfect Blue
I was familiar with Perfect Blue as "that animated film that inspired/was ripped off by Black Swan", which certainly made it enticing to me but is really not a fair or accurate assesment of either film, which certainly hold major similarities but have very distinct and different thematic focuses. They're both about identity crises but Perfect Blues takes that to a degree of existential doubt that isn't really present in Black Swan (that zeroes in on artistic obsession and perfectionism instead), as well as a critique of (Japanese) celebrity culture.
I was initially mixed on the latter, at times finding it somewhat dated (the assumption that pop idols were soon to be a thing of the past for instance) and somewhat obvious, but as Kon really goes all-in on the deeply troubling sexual politics of what Mima is going through (without anyone necessarily verbalizing it), it gets more and more scathing and effective. Mima seems to have no choice between playing the "good girl" as a pop singer or the harlot posing nude and filming titillating rapes scenes as an actress. While there are elements here that are very specific to Japan, that duality is certainly something that applies everywhere (see also: Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus).
The interesting thing here is that it's all internalized: well the whole film is, it being about a woman losing her sense of identity but the rares scenes we get that are not from Mima's perspective are that of fans who do mock/resent her but don't really express it in a sexual way, and all her interviews are sympathetic and upbeat. It's all... well not self-inflicted, it's more that her mind, confronted with the hypocrisy around her, and the impossibility for her to do things "right"... Kon seems to be arguing (rather successfully) that it would be impossible not to go insane in such an environment, that celebrity in and of itself requires a functional personality disorder.
But enough about what the film is saying, more about how it's saying it, right ? Animation is a great medium for depicting a character whose reality is unraveling, and the film succeeds entirely in its ambiguity and its escalation of that process: it's hard to pinpoint exactly where things start to get weird, when she starts losing time, because the editing gradually gets more abrupt, and Kon very cleverly plays with our own doubts as to what is real and what isn't. Writing this, I have a relatively straightforward interpretation of what happens in the film, but there are hints (well, more than that really) of something much twistier going on which would also work just fine... perhaps less satisfyingly as far as I'm concerned, but it nonetheless offers a multiplicity of interpretations that makes the film much more than an easy indictment of celebrity culture.
An impressive achievment, that deserves its deep run and status as one of the favorites in this bracket.
Cure
Cure is my third Kurosawa of the Kiyoshi variety, and so far it seems his speciality is a certain sense of dread, in this case a very quiet, disquieting and troubling one... not to mention scary. I was never a big horror fan, and being scared is never something I've sought out in movies, though I do appreciate it now. As such, I doesn't carry that much water if I say this is one of the scariest films I've ever seen (and I suspect that would not necessarily be a universally shared sentiment), but there you go.
It starts off as a particularly creepy take on the serial killer cat-and-mouse genre (Se7en came to mind, with Kurosawa's Japan only slightly less hell-ish than Fincher's L.A.), one that cleverly builds up the tension by gradually revealing more of the killer's M.O. There's a tinge of the supernatural, because all he does is convince people to murder others, by innocuously asking them questions and using hypnosis. Wht makes this all work so well is that, well, we are (or at least I was) just as mesmerized (Mesmer himself is discussed a bit here, which is always fun) as the victims. The use of a flame in this world of Kurosawa's perpetually drab frames is particularly effective here, and that is where the film's success lies: because this guy is fascinating (good performance too, as is the lead's, though the same can't be said of some of the supporting cast), the danger feels very real and affecting, which makes the film genuinely scary quite often.
It also serves the film thematically. The whole point is that the killer only reveals people's deep-set desires to kill, revealing their "truths" as he would put it. Now... this is not a particularly novel or even clever idea, and most serial killer stories attempting this don't work, but here... Kurosawa has a mastery of tone that makes it all work, especially once the protagonist and the killer actually meet. From then on, Kurosawa toys with us as we wonder about how compromised our protagonist here: has he himself been ypnotized, and what will he do next ? The editing helps ramp up the ambiguity, and... well let's not get spoiler-y, but I think where it goes is - while expected - pretty damn effective and in keeping with the film's central idea.
The best thrillers, to me, are the ones in which you can feel the director playing with you (the audience) and still keep you enthralled despite that: I realize now that this is less Se7en than Zodiac in that sense, with a more horrific bent to it.
Verdict: So, it's almost been a week since I've seen those, and it usually doesn't take me so much time to write these up. It's not that I didn't know what I was going to chose: I had some uncertainty right after watching them, but I made my decision the day after... my problem is justifying it. Part of it is that a lot of what I can come up with as being a deciding factor applies to both films: they're both appealingly open-ended but nonetheless coherent and focused, they both play with their own reality through masterful editing, they're both fascinating and intriguing in ways that I think would reward rewatches. I've got to got with Cure though, it just stayed with me more... though again, it's not like Perfect Blue is in any way forgettable. I still expect it to win the matchup, too (and I'd be entirely fine with that), and I'd say it's the more accomplished work of the two overall, but something about Cure just puts it a tiny notch above it for me.