Quiet Bubble

The Look of Love #5: Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2007)

Satoshi Kon’s Paprika imagines a world in which we’ve created a way to record and entering our dreams at will, so that we can rewind, pause, and zoom in at key moments at any time, as if our dreamscapes were DVDs. A DC Mini, a device created by Dr. Tokita, allows this radiant possibility, but the technology hasn’t been perfected. Anyone who steals a DC Mini can tap into and manipulate the dreams—and ultimately the conscious mind—of anyone who has used the device. Even worse, dreams can be merged with the invention, so that aspects of one person’s subconscious slides into another’s, even when these aspects conflict.

This is Japanese anime, so you know the device will be stolen. In fact, that part pretty much occurs at the outset. What moves Kon’s futuristic fable into the cautionary-tale realm is that, as the DC Mini is used more and more, it becomes harder to separate dreams from reality. A parade—frogs playing flutes, dolls come to life, confetti that’s really metallic butterflies, creatures never seen in nature—dances and struts to eerie music on the city streets. At first, this is part of one person’s particular dream. By the end, they’ve entered actual streets.

Again, this is a Japanese anime, so there’s a 90% chance this will lead to citywide catastrophe and possible societal meltdown.

The only two people who have a chance of stopping the madness are Dr. Tokita, DC Mini’s inventor, and his project supervisor/head psychoanalyst Dr. Atsuko Chiba. Tokita is a gargantuan slob of a man-child, utterly brilliant at engineering but socially inept in any other way. He eats five entrees in one meal. His apartment is a mess of outdated toys, porn, the remnants of bachelor food, and gadgets. He radiates unbridled energy. He appears to almost consume space.

Chiba is everything Tokita is not—female, icy, thin, sexy, and adult. Despite the fact that Tokita created the DC Mini, it’s clear that the only reason the project ever left the ground is because she shepherded its creation and use through the production process.

They share one trait: utter loneliness. Chiba’s even created an avatar for herself in the dreamworld—that would be Paprika—who’s hipper and younger than she is, and knows her way around dreams better than Chiba grasps real life. Tokita pours himself into his work; his only friend is his assistant, and that guy’s insanity starts the chain reaction of events in the movie.

During Paprika’s climax, in which Tokita has been transformed into a giant-version of a childhood toy and is rampaging downtown (long story), something curious happens. Chiba tries to slow down this crazed version of Tokita down, by reminding him that he likes her, that he loves something about the world he’s destroying.

The Look of Love #4: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Gwyneth Paltrow, almost but not quite smiling.

In Wes Anderson’s near-perfect The Royal Tenenbaums, the filmmaker brings together elements from children’s literature, French New Wave cinema, and the dry genteel wit of Ealing comedies. Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, however, seems to be an aesthetic centerpiece for the movie. The characters wear the same clothes throughout the film; the humor is deadpan and melancholy; for all the maximalist tendencies of the set design, the color scheme is muted, much as the comic strip’s palette was downscaled from what was around it on the Sunday newspaper page; the characters—like Charlie Brown, Linus, and the whole gang—are essentially arrested adolescents, grasping for adulthood while being stuck in the costumes of youth, unable to say precisely what’s on their minds. Hell, Anderson even uses a snippet from Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” (from A Charlie Brown Christmas) during a crucial scene.

Peanuts, at its best, blended the downcast and the high-spirited seamlessly. During an early scene in Tenenbaums, a small gem occurs that encapsulates everything that’s right about the movie’s view of love and everything that Anderson understands about Schulz’s sensibility. It’s among the most beautiful romantic gestures I’ve seen in American cinema, and among—unlike this sentence—the most understated.

The Look of Love #3: Krystof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

“So we put our arms around each other and started kissing. I think we were both somewhat surprised by how good it felt. Her mouth was the best thing my mouth had felt in quite a while. I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss. Our lips cooperated; they understood each other.”

—Nicholson Baker, The Fermata (1994)

The Look of Love #2: Tim Burton & Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Even in outsized, animated musicals, the little gestures count. Conceptualist Tim Burton and director Henry Selick understand, actually, that it’s in the most overblown circumstances that small measures matter the most. (I’ll be curious to see if Burton kept this in mind for his adaptation of Sweeney Todd.)

Sally, a reanimated corpse, loves Jack Skellington, the impresario and ghoul extraordinaire of Halloween Town. Though she’s brave enough to repeatedly escape her Dr. Frankenstein-esque creator and go toe-to-toe with a boogeyman, she can’t quite express herself to Jack. Jack, of course, is oblivious both to her feelings for him and vice versa.

Midway through the movie, Jack plans to hijack Christmas, giving Santa Claus a year off while the monsters and ghosts handle the creation of this year’s winter holiday. It will be a hilarious disaster: children will be given toys that attack them; a boy will unwrap a shrunken head in front of his appalled parents; Christmas Eve will be a night of sheer terror for suburbia, providing an influence for a Futurama episode. But that’s in the future. In a scene that serves as calm before the storm, Sally tries to comfort the worrying Jack.

As is her fashion, she does it with food rather than words.

The Look of Love #1: Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Shefali Shetty as Ria Verma in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001).

For a decade, ever since her parents died, Ria Verma (Shefali Shetty) has lived in the household of her beloved uncle and aunt’s family, but she’s seen too much of their tumultuous but reasonably stable marriage in close-up to believe in fairytale visions of romance. She’s seen their daughter, Ria’s cousin/best friend, cheat on her betrothed with a married TV news anchor, and question openly whether she’s even fit to be married. Throughout the movie, we’ll listen in as family members comment cattily, almost mournfully, on Ria’s figure (zaftig), dreams (she wants to be a writer, and she’s the movie’s resident intellectual), and skin tone (dark). “She’ll never get married,” they say either in gesture or right to her face. To add injury to insult—and, yes, I meant the inversion—the only man she’s ever attracted was entirely unwanted: an old family friend molested her, several times, when she was a child.

So, she’s understandably wary of love, and advises strongly and forcefully against rushing headlong into it, or even crawling to it at a turtle’s pace.