Paprika (2007)
Paprika, a Japanese anime film from last year, is wild and visually stunning. I wanted to like it, but the more I think on it, the more it bothers me. Ultimately it’s a fanboy fantasy, and a feminist nightmare.
In the near future, psychotherapists have technology to record and enter dreams (think Until the End of the World, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The team responsible is headed by an attractive but buttoned down woman and a gluttonous geek boy. The woman’s alter ego in dreams is the Paprika of the title. Someone steals and subverts the technology, and dreamworlds collide, then intrude disastrously into reality. My favorite part of the film is the parade of dreams–the color, image and music all combine for a walloping sensory experience. What happens to the female doctor, though, is beyond apology for me.
She is threatened multiple times by men who say they are going to play rough with her. One tries to rape her, and submerges a dream hand inside her, then rips off her skin from the inside, so she is naked and unconscious when another character rams tentacles down her throat. Later, she becomes a child, and drinks the dark dream stuff spread by the huge, nude male villain , which I found too close an allusion to fellatio. Finally, she rebels against her dream self and rescues the glutton-geek, declaring her love for him, then later saying she’s going to marry him and take his name.
The plot is murky and while the images are provocative, too often I found them offensive.