Dolls is a film of extraordinary beauty and tenderness from a filmmaker chiefly associated with grave mayhem and deadpan humor. That is to say, this is not one more Takeshi Kitano movie focused on stoical cops or gangsters. The title refers most directly, but not exclusively, to the theatrical tradition of Bunraku, enacted by half-life-size dolls and their visible but shrouded onstage manipulators. Such a performance--a drama of doomed lovers--occupies the first five minutes of the film, striking a keynote that resonates as flesh-and-blood characters take up the action.... The film-proper is dominated by the all-but-wordless odyssey of a susceptible yuppie and the jilted fiancée driven mad by his desertion to marry the boss's daughter. Bound by a blood-red cord, they move hypnotically through a landscape variously urban and natural, stylized only by the breathtaking purity of light, angle, color, and formal movement imposed by Kitano's compositional eye and rigorous, fragmentary editing. Along the way we also pick up the story of an elderly gangster, haunted by memories of the lover he deserted three decades earlier and generations of "brothers" for whose deaths he was, in the accepted order of things, responsible. Another strand is added to the imagistic weave via a doll-like pop singer and a groupie blinded by devotion to her. This is a film in which character, morality, metaphysics, and destiny are all expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective. It sounds abstract--and it is--but it's also heartbreaking and thrilling to behold. Kitano isn't in it, but as an artist he's all over it. His finest film, and for all its exoticism, his most accessible. --Richard T. Jameson [show more]
I can't judge this Takeshi Kitano movie against his others as it's the first one I've seen but it seems to me the work of a master; someone who has honed his craft to the nth degree and who knows a great deal about telling stories in purely visual terms.
There are three stories in "Dolls". In the first a young man feels it is his responsibility to care for the woman he has driven to madness and attempted suicide to the extent that he gives up everything he has for her. It has the simplicity and poignancy of a great short story. From all reports the second story may be more typical of Kitano, dealing as it does with a yakuza. But it, too, confounds expectations; the fact that the main character is a gangster proves almost inconsequential. Rather it is a meditation on old age, death and lost love. These stories bleed into each other with the central characters in the first moving seamlessly into the second.
There is a third story involving a pop singer and the fan who loves her but by now these stories have become like those Russian dolls, one fitting perfectly into the other. There is also a prologue and an epilogue that adheres to the first story. They are all love stories and all are indelibly moving. The film is also wonderfully photographed in colour and wide-screen and Kitano wrote it, directed it and edited it. It is, indeed, the work of a master and makes me want to rush to see his other work.
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