Propyro wrote:by the way is there an uncut dvd available since what moonlight said is kind of worrying me ... unless she saw it on tv ... but yea ... i've seen perfect blue in HMV and other places for months and was always wondering about it. Now it's on my shopping list ... danm dose that thing ever stop growing ...
The DVD I have appears to be uncut. I bought it in the regular (not "adult") section of my local video store, but it's labelled as "not rated - for 17 and up" and I noticed that the movie (not certain what version) was listed in rightSTUF's "adult" catalog instead of their regular one. The version on my DVD matches (to the extent I can judge this from memory) a version I've seen in a couple of different theatres.
On cutting the scenes that tell you what's really going on, I don't think so. There just
aren't any scenes that make it clear whether she's hallucinating or in "reality". That's part of the point, that it's all open to interpretation. There are some little clues (like broken things that are suddenly not broken) but really, you have to decide for yourself which of the threads are in which layer of reality. If there's a cut version floating around (blech, blech!) I'd expect them to cut it for sex and violence, rather than to make it even more obscure.
I'd be interested to hear anything authoritative on the character's name. In the Japanese soundtrack she's variously called "Mima" and "Mimarin". It's not clear to me whether Mima is her name and "-rin" is some kind of honorific like -san or -chan (it's not one I've heard anywhere else), or if Mimarin is her name and people often shorten it.
Spoiler wrote:Others claimed that Mima's manager, Rumi, was the one who ended up in the insane asylum. That's one possible interpretation, but I'm not sure it's the best one. The girl in the insane asylum looked a lot like Rumi, but she also looked a lot like the evil fantasy Mima, the one that remained a virginal pop idol. I think the most plausible explanation is that there was a girl who got raped and constructed an elaborate fantasy in which she was an actress and all the bad things that happened to her in real life were actually events she was simulating in her job. That's the girl in the asylum - she never was an actress or a model or in show business at all. Her story, however, was used as the plot for a television show. The real Mima is the actress who played the crazy girl in the television show; she appears only at the end and all the movie up to that point is various permutations of the crazy girl's fantasies. I'm undecided on how many of the murders actually happened. I suspect that Mr. Me-Mania never existed at all - he, like the evil fantasy Mima, is just another character the crazy girl imagined in order to explain away facts in her own life and behaviour that she didn't want to face.
Incidentally, did you notice that there are actually two (attempted, simulated, or possibly real) rapes in the movie? The one they film for the TV show is the one everyone remembers, but later when Me-Mania is threatening Mima with his knife, and she kills him and the body disappears, he's restraining her and ripping off her clothes in a way that he wouldn't need to do for a plain murder. Note that at that point they're back on the strip club set in exactly the same place as the other rape. I think both those scenes are echoes of the one real rape (which we never see), which the crazy girl keeps re-living in her memory.
However, and as I say, this is the point, that's only one possible explanation. The movie doesn't force you to interpret it only one way and I don't think there is any one single "correct" way to interpret it.
I used
Perfect Blue for my
first AMV. There are some technical problems with it because it is my first and I've learned a lot about making AMVs since, but if you're a fan of the movie, you might like the video.
