Paprika

1 September 2007

Just as I was clocking off work today, one of my coworkers came up to me and told me I had to see this movie, no questions asked. I’m so glad she told me. This was just a wonderful picture.
The story is about a research team busy developing a product that can allow dreams to be transferred onto computers. It’s supposedly going to be very useful in psychotherapy. But when a disgruntled member of the research team steals the device, the whole crew has to kick into action to prevent the world of dreams from breaking through and overwhelming reality.
We’re never completely sure, though, if the research team itself is especially “real.” As the movie goes on layer after layer gets pulled away. People keep “waking up” from one reality into another even more fantastical than the last. But even as every bit of reality comes into question, the characters themselves become more and more real to us, especially the brooding, beautiful At-Chan, who’s created an alternative identity in her dream life: the sprightly and flirtatious Paprika.
In the century or so since Freud released his book on dreams, it seems we’ve amassed this huge visual vocabulary of dream images that we collectively know tell us something about ourselves: lately a slew of science-fiction movies have come out which attempt to harvest the vast field of burgeoning archetypes in a single swoop of the cinematic scythe. “The Matrix,” “The Cell,” and “Existenz” all come to mind, but none of them are quite as honest or as beautiful as “Paprika.”