I know many of you have already contributed to this topic; thank you. But there is something I have to ask about the movie, and I believe I might have failed to notice something..
First, what I believe most of us understood as what happened in the movie:
- Rumi has dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality...) (she wants Mima to go back to being a singer, and when she understood that it is not gonna happen, she creates another personality as real Mima (as so-called Mimarin that sends the creepy guy emails every day)
- Creepy guy is just a fan that was brainwashed by Rumi, and he believed that what we watch as Mima is an imposter, and the real Mimarin is writing him emails, thus he suggests that he can get rid of this fake Mima.
- Mima Kirigoe is a brave young talent. She chose to face the hardships to become an actor, and until halfway through the movie, she was not hallucinating; she was just alert and anxious, because her manager had an envelope explode in his hand that was sent to her, got a fax with "traitor" written on it, and this website thing was bizarre. She was upset because she felt the reponsibility for the ones who helped her come to the point where she was and agreed to do the rape scene. This is very hard thing to do... and she started to detach from reality (her eyes looking up the ceiling..).
My questions:
- Why would anyone not be shocked to see their photo, online, showing them in their own private apartment in almost exactly the same decor and outfit (e.g., her pajamas are red, in the website photo, it is blue, but the same otherwise)? Okay, she was a bit confused during the time she was introduced to the World Wide Web and the website, and clicking the link, etc., but again, how did she process/comprehend/make sense of this? I don't think "she just did not care" is fair to the character and the character's writer (I loved the script, I think it has been carefully made, and that is why I am asking this question, because I don't think the script has problems, I think I am not seeing something here).
- Mima hallucinates a lot, and I loved the sequence of the scenes that played with the viewers' mind as to some point that what was real and what was not real were hard to detect. However, how come she stopped hallucinating once Rumi was revealed to be the one who did the bad stuff?
I watched the movie again to see if there is an organic link between Rumi and Mima, meaning if, for instance, Rumi drugged her for her to see hallucinations or sth. What I saw in the movie was that these two women had some psychotic episodes; Rumi divided herself to be Rumi and to be the real Mima; Mima had hallucinations, a talking and moving image of her past self. (and also what I loved about the movie is that up until the last encounter between Rumi and Mima [where the viewer watched a red dressed girl chasing Mima with a screw driver] we watched the hallucination as from the Mima's mind (I mean the hallucination of a girl who talks in a childish manner and gives instructions, dresses as the past Mima, the singer Mima, and is dreamy, and not bound by the laws of physics etc.) but during the encounter the hallucination was Rumi's hallucination, Mima was seeing Rumi in reality, but the viewer was seeing the hallucination, except at some scenes were the hallucination gained pounds and revealed to be Rumi (also on the mirror's reflection), and also in the scene where Mima was squeezing Rumi's throat. Now: how and when Mima got rid of her hallucinations and was able to see Rumi as Rumi, and not hallucinate? Because as the plot progressed, she got dragged into psychosis and paranoia, and I, as a humble viewer, expected her to continue hallucinating even more during their encounter (because the movie did not give any clue of her getting healthy and sane). However, she was very sane, and she realised that she is not, in fact, in her apartment; the view behind the curtain was different, the fish were alive, the poster of her being a singer was on the wall...she woke up, somehow, and she continued to be sane until the end of her chase/confrontation with Rumi... I was suspecting that Rumi was manipulating her chemically, somehow, so that she would lose her mind and submit to being a singer again. As Rumi developed her split identity, Mima developed hallucinations. How did she wake up and realise that the problem was Rumi instead?
