Middle-aged service worker Hideo (Itsuji Itao) shares his tiny apartment with an inflatable sex doll (Bae Doona, “Sense8”) in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Air Doll,” a contemplative, melancholy — if minor — study of loneliness. (This 2009 film from the director who would go on to make “Shoplifters” and “The Truth” is getting its first U.S. release.)
And though the label on the box reads “Lovely Girl Candy,” and Hideo finds real human interaction “annoying,” he gives the doll the name “Nozomi,” after a former girlfriend. She’s as close to being real as he wants, and she silently absorbs his minor monologues and grievances about his work day before he has sex with her.
There are other inanimate, less functional dolls in Hideo’s home: small figures on shelves, a bedside “Paddington”-style teddy bear, and linens decorated with nesting dolls. But it’s Nozomi who, one day while Hideo is at work, gains consciousness and living, breathing life. Dressed in a maid costume, Nozomi steps outside to Katsuhiko Maeda’s childlike music-box score and quickly becomes fascinated with the behavior of the people she meets.
Of course, it turns out that those people have insignificant troubles of their own. A middle-aged woman fears the aging process and her own encroaching invisibility and misinterprets Nozomi’s intentions; a neighbor child with a doll of her own becomes a “Little Mermaid”–style avatar, echoing Nozomi’s desire to be part of the human world; video-store employees give her a job and extend a welcoming education that eventually turns Nozomi’s new life into an existential crisis.
Movies rented and discussed in the store become Nozomi’s primary lens for viewing human behavior. And her understanding of love takes the form of a romantic relationship begun with co-worker Junichi (Arata Iura, “True Mothers”), one that provides her with her first taste of real pleasure. But when Junichi — attracted to Nozomi for her simplicity — teaches her life lessons from films that can’t resonate with her newly lived experience, it prompts damage; movies become less like guideposts and more like unsolvable riddles.
Throughout, Nozomi narrates her inner life, and she observes her experiences with increasingly clear-minded wisdom. When men use her (notably when Hideo replaces her with a new doll he names, again, Nozomi) she repeats the mantra, “I am an air doll” and retreats into an understanding of herself as empty object, a disposable “substitute” for intimacy.
She knows intuitively that she has to go along to get along, returning each day to Hideo’s bed, naked, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Yet when women cross her path, she initiates connection for better or worse, eager to learn the rules of being alive and the ways she might break free. “We are not meant to be alone,” she asserts, even as disappointing interactions contradict that yearning.
Collaborating with cinematographer Ping Bin Lee — whose work with legendary directors Wong Kar-wai (“In the Mood for Love”) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (“The Assassin”) reflects a very confident relationship with stillness and compositional clarity — Kore-eda frames his characters and their actions simply. Details are quiet and small: Nozomi lends a literal shoulder to a sleeping man on the bus in a reflexively dutiful gesture of comfort, a video store poster for “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” suggests a cinematic history where women are symbolic objects echoing Nozomi’s literal state, an elderly man she meets laments the short lifespan of companion pets, and a moment of deflation and spontaneously erotic inflation is framed as Nozomi’s first real orgasm.
As a symbol of disconnection, Nozomi is obvious, right down to her translucent shadow and corporeal coldness (it’s winter and she walks the city in summer outfits, unfazed by the temperature) and her narrative becomes less and less subtle as it unfolds. But thanks to Kore-eda’s characteristic practice of thoughtful scripting and gentle direction, the metaphors, though too numerous, land gently and effectively.
Bae’s attention to her character’s emergent inner life allows her eventual confrontation with Hideo to take on the emotional heft it deserves. “What do you like about me?” she asks, interrogating his ownership before she takes control of her air pump and discards it.
Before one final act of self-determination, she meets the dollmaker (Joe Odagiri) responsible for her existence. “Was everything you saw in the world sad?” he asks. And though Nozomi’s response deflects from the truth, the film’s pervasive air of melancholy knows better the consequences of being human.
“Air Doll” opens in US theaters and on demand Feb. 4.