Looks like I made it to the second round of the tourney thing, but I’m sadly short on topics for writing thanks to the fact that my laptop is the only working PC I have right now. It’s able to cope with DVD playback though so I can at least rewatch old favourites; I’ve had Le Portrait de Petite Cossette for instance on my shelf for a while but only came back to it last week…and I’m glad I did.
The first time I watched this I felt a bit overwhelmed by the visuals so didn’t really grasp what it was trying to say. I guess it was slightly wasted on me at the time but watching the three episodes again, across as many days, worked better for me so now I really feel I appreciate it more than I did then.
I was also shopping around for music recently and picked up the OST. Oddly enough, the fact that it’s Kajiura helped a bit in understanding the message behind the story because the similarities in the music, and the aesthetic of the OAV overall, reminded me of my beloved Rakkyo and the themes surrounding it, in a roundabout way. The excessive amount of thought I’ve poured into that series in recent months helped get my analysis of Cossette into order at last.
Both stories involve an unconventional romance subplot and are accompanied by gorgeous blood-spattered imagery that reflects this (the fact that it’s gory but still beautiful is I think an achievement in itself). In both cases the main relationship is tested by the two protagonists’ inner conflicts and supernatural external forces that also influence how it progresses. I found the issue of self-sacrifice particularly interesting because Eiri’s suffering for Cossette’s sake reminds me a lot of what Mikiya goes through for Shiki by the end of the seventh KnK film.
Granted, it was a similarity in BGM that forced me to make the connection and the parallels are limited, but in both series the romantic bonds between the lead characters are very different from the feelings of friendship and/or infatuation that everyday life and more conventional pieces of fiction work with. The unusual idea of demonstrating your love by suffering on another’s behalf is another area in which the themes of both titles overlap.
Cossette emphasises this more perhaps, but I felt both that and KnK examine how far people are prepared to go in the name of love, and additionally demonstrate how such experiences affect their relationships with others. I also noticed that Shinbo’s story and Nasu’s portray the overwhelming, blinding effects of romance by leading an innocent, ordinary soul out of his own world and into harm’s way.
The Mikiya/Shiki dynamic is a wonderful thing and I hope I’m able to discuss it at greater length soon (hint: someone, get the full novel published in English already. I BEG OF YOU). I found Mikiya’s steadfast faith in her innocence to be deeply moving, and the way in which he was ironically the last to realise how deeply he’d fallen for her was realistically portrayed too. That business of declaring how he was prepared to bear her sins in her place was I felt Nasu’s typically idiosyncratic way of highlighting, among other things, how true love involves accepting the other’s faults.
Eiri’s bearing of his love interest’s sins is a little different, however. She superimposes her former fiancé’s soul onto him and redirects the curses that resulted from the betrayal and her tragic death, in the hope that the pain inflicted on him will somehow atone for the wrongs committed against her. This later takes a surprising turn as Cossette begins to fall in love with Eiri too: she begins to regret using him in this way and, as he points out, he may have inherited Marcelo’s soul, fate or whatever it is, but he isn’t Marcelo.
I initially thought Cossette was a tale of obsession, and given how disorientating the visuals often are it’s all too easy to be distracted (as much as I love Shinbo’s approach in this OAV, I will concede that this can be a problem for some). Now I believe that it’s more of a tale which asks us what true love means: Marcelo was supposed to be in love with Cossette but he selfishly killed her in order to prevent her growing old and becoming someone different from his image of her.
Eiri on the other hand is entranced by the story of Cossette as played out in the Venetian glass and later captivated by the enigmatic image of Marcelo’s portraits; I suppose you can debate the validity of an attraction based on what Eiri’s love for Cossette is based on, but the fact remains that Marcelo murdered her over an ideal while Eiri wants to seek out the ‘true’ Cossette and save her.
That twist in the final episode flew over my head the first time but now I’ve had a second chance, it makes the narrative more satisfying. The contrasting art styles of Marcelo and Eiri are a metaphor for their attraction to the heroine of the title because Marcelo wanted an eternal unchanging image while Eiri is inspired by a living, moving character trapped in an unlikely place. The most dramatic piece of symbolism for me is when Eiri paints a portrait of her - in his own blood for crying out loud! – which lifts the curse. I don’t know about you, but I thought that was pretty hardcore.
I’m still a little undecided over the effectiveness of the ending though, assuming the interpretation of Cossette’s spirit living on in Shoko is correct. The running time prevents much development of the supporting characters sadly, but from what little I saw of Shoko I liked her: she was the girl-next-door and crucially was, well, real. For that reason I was kinda rooting for a Eiri/Shoko End but after learning the full tragedy of Cossette’s backstory…who wouldn’t feel sorry for the girl trapped in the afterlife for being murdered by the one she loved?
Cossette is convoluted, unsettling, disorientating and obtuse…the fact that it’s intentionally so makes the sentiment of people who don’t like it all the more understandable. Perhaps because I’ve come back to it after watching several of Shinbo’s other shows I was able to go along with its more eccentric moments with less conscious effort. The music heightened my enjoyment a lot too, and I’m still amazed at how Marina Inoue produces such a deep, complex singing voice that’s so different from her vivacious dialogue delivery. Gem is a lovely song by the way.
As in quite a lot of stories like this, the overall aim of the OAV was to create something that looked beautiful and captivating as opposed to encouraging the viewer to dwell on the details, so in that sense it succeeds…but then, I always felt that way about it. Only when I caught one particular train of thought by chance thanks to the weird way my brain makes connections with certain things did I think beyond that. I suppose that’s the thing I really want to get across here…Eiri had to see past the superficial image to understand the depth of his fascination with Cossette, and I ended up doing the same.