Air doll

In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl enabled Ryan Gosling to have an actor's ball partnering an inflatable lover. Two years later, innovative Japanese director Hirokasu Koreeda played well with the same concept in Air Doll, his screen adaptation of a manga written the same year by Yoshiie Gouda (entitled, self-mockingly, perhaps, "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl").

Nozomi, the life-size plastic doll dressed as a maid (with optional costume changes), is the pampered companion of a lonely middle-aged waiter (Arata, whose movie debut in 1998 was in Hirokasu's After Life). He chats with her during dinner, takes her out for wheelchair rides, has sex with her and meticulously washes her detachable lower part. One day, the doll lurches to life, acquiring puppet-like cold-skinned movement, a heart and soul, abilities to sketch, hold memories and mimic human words, and lands a job in a video store, where she falls in love. Played with po-faced big-eyed mystified innocence by Donna (The Ring Virus, Host, Linda x 3) Bae, Nozomi is an enchanting fantasy character.

At its original 125-minute running length, the movie was dismissed by many critics as an over-long fable. Eight or more minutes were cut out for foreign markets; the effects are frustrating at the end of the movie, when Nozomi inexplicably enters and changes the lives of local lonely characters she'd met on her wandering. Her expanding role, growing heart and inevitable death become a series of fairly silly tableaux, and may have been more credible and meaningful within an extended narrative context. For the first hour, though, the switches from wry reality to magical realism are very acceptable logical nonsense.

I guess Japan's movie-goers (even more than those in the USA) require a movie to last at least two hours, to justify high ticket prices. That could explain the lengths that film producers need to go to, often working with slender plots. One side benefit of that is the necessity to employ directors who can fill time with rich details, artful lighting and exquisitely composed scenes; Hirakasu achieves all that, creating an intriguing visual essay on urban loneliness, human frailty and love's and life's substitutes. "Pretty basic philosophy" sounds dismissive, but isn't meant to be.