Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, Air Doll, is a bittersweet urban fairytale about an inflatable sex doll – one that comes to life after magically finding herself with ‘a heart she’s not supposed to have’. Exquisitely given an air of frailty and childlike innocence by Korean actress Bae Doo-na (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, The Host), the doll – named Nozomi by her lonely, middle-aged owner – runs in small steps around her Tokyo neighbourhood, learns to speak from the people she follows around, and eventually falls in love with a video rental store clerk, Junichi (Kore-eda’s regular, Arata), who shows her the joy and sadness of the living world.

 

Since his early days as a TV documentary filmmaker, Kore-eda, 47, has been displaying an insight into the profound humanity beneath news headlines: his 2001 feature Distance, in which the relatives of cult members gather on the anniversary of their terrorist attack and group suicide, brings to mind the Aum cult’s sarin-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system six years before; similarly, his award-winning Nobody Knows (2004), which chronicles four young siblings’ quiet descent into tragedy after being abandoned by their reckless mother, is based on a true story from the 1980s. By comparison, Air Doll, the director’s seventh feature, comes from a rather unlikely source: Yoshie Gouda’s manga, The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl.

 

“I saw this 20-page manga about nine years ago,” recalls Kore-eda, leisurely leaning back in his seat, when we meet on his hotel’s patio during the Toronto International Film Festival. “If you just turn it into a film, it wouldn’t even last for ten minutes.” The director was, however, impressed by a key scene in the manga, in which Nozomi’s body was accidentally pricked, only for Junichi to literally breathe life back into her. “In the original, there was a close-up between his face, as he blows life into her, and her face, when she’s somewhat embarrassed. It was a very sensual portrait. As I hadn’t tried this kind of approach in my films before, it was really a challenge to myself to see if I could pull it off.”

 

While Kore-eda is quick to point out that his film’s subjects of life and sex represent a new direction for him (“even though the female protagonist isn’t really human”), the director, when led into a discussion on such themes, has somehow failed to hide the slight nervousness that may befit any director taking a first step into the realm of eroticism. He smiles, with a shade of shyness, at an innocuous enquiry about the significance of the act of letting air out of the doll. Instead, he asks, “What do you think?” Drawing on the logic of his fantasy story, our reply: maybe it’s to let her feel the pain of being human?

 

Kore-eda pauses for several more seconds before disclosing the full story, laughing all the way through. “Before we made this film, we actually bought an air doll, filled it up, and put it in a conference room,” he says. “We tested putting its air out. When she’s full, she was just plastic. But when the air went out of her, there’s something about the way her knees bent that felt very erotic to all the males in the room. For me, it’s a portrait of the difference in how men and women approach sex: she wants to be fulfilled; he wants to unfill her.”

 

Although, at one point in the interview, Kore-eda jokes that he’s directing “free-style” (“I don’t have a style – I’m trying not to have one.”), there can be no mistaking the recurrent themes – of ageing, mortality, and grief – in the oeuvre of this great humanist director. In his debut feature, Maborosi (1995), a young woman tries to comprehend the sudden, violent suicide of her seemingly merry husband. In his metaphysical masterpiece, After Life (1998), the newly dead are given one week to pick a single memory from their lifetimes to take to eternity. His recent Still Walking (2008), which recounts one day in the lives of an emotionally out-of-sync family, is an intensely poignant portrait of memory and loss. Even his light-hearted period comedy Hana (2006), which tells of the life-affirming story of a young samurai, is ironically set against the backdrop of ‘the Forty-seven Ronin’ legend, a reminder of the country’s preference for loyalty over life.

 

“What I’ve been portraying,” Kore-eda reflects, “is not so much death than how the experience of death transforms the living, as well as what those left behind choose to do with the time that remains. [The doll] did her best in the short life allotted to her. She lives a more human life than any other human character that appears in the film, who have turned away from being human and ended up more artificial – or more doll-like – than her.” So does the idea of ageing frighten Kore-eda sometimes? “Yes,” says the director after another long pause. “But you can’t mature without growing old. They say food is best right before it rots. [Laughs.] It takes time to ferment, and I think every living being needs that.”

 

Air Doll opens Thursday 4.