We recently took a look a Satoshi Kon’s directorial debut (1997’s Perfect Blue) and found that “we, as viewers, can’t trust anything we see. We watch events unfold from [a] distorted perception of reality, and we’re just along for the twisted, disturbing ride.”

So it’s not much of a surprise that Kon’s sophomore effort, 2002’s Millennium Actress, plays with some of those same themes. Indeed, Kon actually envisioned the two films to be somewhat complementary – sister films, as it were.

However, where Perfect Blue has us questioning reality as we watch a grim, violent vision of celebrity fall apart, Millennium Actress goes in the opposite direction and tugs on completely different emotional strings.

Millennium Actress tells the story of legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (who is fictional but apparently based on the lives of  Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine) as she looks back on her life and career. An aging Chiyoko sits with a pair of documentary filmmakers, and as her story unfolds, the film quickly blends reality and fantasy as it seamlessly interweaves scenes of her life with scenes from her films (and brings the filmmakers along for the ride).

Chiyoko’s life has been dominated by a single mystery: a key that was given to her by a stranger when she was much younger. That key is… well, the key to everything. It’s not a subtle metaphor. But the man who gave it to a young, impressionable Chiyoko disappeared soon after – but remained in her heart forever.

As Chiyoko and the filmmakers embark on a whirlwind journey through her life and career (and hundreds of years of Japanese history), the key is always there. Always haunting her. Always reminding her of the man she lost and the promised meeting that never happened.

If Perfect Blue tells the story of how a single man could destroy a woman’s life, Millennium Actress flips the script and shows how a single man (or at least the memory of one) could be the thread holding everything together.

Nevertheless, it is a bit of an unrealistic and idealistic look at love. It is also very obviously a look at this love from a male perspective. Chiyoko is meant to be a legendary actress known throughout Japan. Her career spanned multiple decades and genres. She was a wildly successful actress near the end of her life.

But that success – the profound success of a woman in mid-century Japan – isn’t the focus here. Instead, Chiyoko’s story is centered on her love affair with a missing man – someone whose name she doesn’t know and whose face she’s never seen. Which has me asking… Why?

This obsession shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider Millennium Actress is from a male director and is about the making of a documentary by two men.

We’re watching Chiyoko’s life unfold not through her eyes but from the perspectives of several men. So yeah, ultimately, her story isn’t about how she defied all odds and found success and celebrity; it’s about how helpless she was to get over the memory of a single dude.

The recent Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory includes a few brief interviews with the producers and English cast (Laura Post, Abby Trott), and that’s it as far as special features. Still, this is the first time the film has been released on Blu-ray in North America, and it is a gorgeous work of animation.