It’s easy to say that a Japanese film; about an actress and model who’s attempting to keep her looks that have been given to her from plastic surgery, who is also an icon to a legion of schoolgirls, is plasticky and sometimes annoying. The film though does try to go deeper into the subject and to look at what this means to the individual, those that surround her and those in her fanbase.
The beauty in question is Lilicia, she makes women and girls swoon, men lust after her and makes a number of people realise her potential as a commodity. She’s about to embark on a film career, when she appears on a magazine cover the edition sells out, she’s at the top of her game. Although it’s speculated that her plastic surgery will fail and that she will fall apart. It’s here that the film explores the psychology as well as the physical nature of what happens to her. When her looks begin to fail she starts to lose her grip on reality and hallucinate. I suppose really that reality went when she changed her looks and effectively became another person.
The trouble with psychological dramas is that they can become overwrought. This is especially true when a character is portrayed in having major problems distinguishing reality and fantasy. There is as well the thought that the people that are talked about in this film don’t inhabit the real world anyway. That the talent, as it were, have their ego massaged by those around them and that they may have been protected from certain truths and that when these truths coalesce and build up the end can come as a nasty shock. On the balance though the film could have been far more annoying than it was, I just couldn’t bring myself to like it very much though.
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