Better than Inception; Paprika and Cinema's relationship with Dreams

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

Dreams are an obsession of cinema. The two are interwoven through their artifice and intangibility, creating and recreating spaces that range from familiar to foreign, abstract to uncanny. It's a relationship as old as the medium itself, evident right from the beginning in many of George Méliès phantasmagoric visions, tapping into a Gothic sensibility which revelled in the dark side of the human psyche. It can be traced through the whole of cinematic history; Un Chien Andalou, The Wizard of Oz, Meshes of the Afternoon, the works of Tarkovsky and then David Lynch. If not directly about dreams, these works at least move and behave like dreams. With Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), dreams became a window into character psychology as well as an excuse to do cool CGI things. But for all its cinematic splendour and wow-factor Inception lacked something its predecessors excelled at; poetry. Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006) triumphs in comparison by doing that which Inception didn't, and avoiding some of the things it did.

The film is set in a near future where a recent invention called the “DC-mini” allows Psychotherapists to enter their patients' dreams. Following its theft, the team in charge of the device, including a Doctor Atsuko Chiba and her alter-ego Paprika, attempt to track it down. Cue rabbit hole; dreams enter reality, reality enters dreams. The line between the two grows increasingly obscure in a way that serves a deeper, more profound purpose. Bringing online spaces and the medium of film itself into the mix, Satoshi Kon creates a sense of balance between the internal and the external that feels wholly appropriate to Japanese cinema. It's a nuanced narrative idiosyncrasy that Nolan and the rest of Hollywood sorely lacks, usually placing emphasis on chasing the macguffin rather than pausing to explore the path that it uncovers. Paprika doesn't overstay its welcome, but it manages to ask some interesting questions on the way with delicate flourishes here and there, largely through its Detective character. The times spent in Paprika's website-bar discussing his student film, echoed by his recurring dreams about a homicide case are among the film's most poignant moments. It's a nice touch that we never learn much about the homicide case or get bogged down in useless details surrounding it, as many Thrillers seem to do fetishistically. Furthermore, Paprika's existence is never truly explained which, while perhaps to the chagrin of many, keeps the film neat yet open-ended. This, combined with an attention to the geography of dreamscapes, and imagery only anime can conjure up, imbue the film with a unique vision of its own.

The charges it faces of not being quite as thrilling as Inception or quite as fantastical as Spirited Away (2001) miss the point. Paprika doesn't tread a middle ground between these two but creates something completely different. It isn't a Science Fiction Thriller, but closer in tone to the philosophical fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges. It's a film that's easy to overlook for a variety of reasons, even watching it with the wrong expectations might be enough to turn one off of it. It doesn't reach the magnificent heights of some of its immediate neighbours, but it does understand exactly what it wants to be and it achieves it with a modern, introspective quality and an utterly unique style that guarantees it a place in the canon of Poetic-Dream-Films.