Move over, Weird Science and Lars and the Real Girl. Here’s the trailer for Japanese art-film director Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Air Doll, a lyrical Pygmalion tale that played Cannes last month and is due stateside later this year.
In the film, a man’s blow-up sex doll comes to life one day (as Bae Doo-na, the Korean actress, whom genre film fans will recognize from The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.) She steps out, discovers the world, gets a job, and starts dating a video store clerk. (No doubt one who has rented Mannequin a few too many times.) Sounds kinky, but in the hands of Kore-eda (After Life, Nobody Knows), frequently a poet of memory and loss, the premise becomes an opportunity for a haunting meditation on innocence and love. Or so say those who saw it at the Cannes Film Festival, and so it appears from the trailer below (h/t to Twitch, Nippon Cinema).
