Dolls
By Chris Hyde
March 22, 2005
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Japanese film celebrity known as Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi) has had a long and distinguished career as an actor, being well known for his multiple appearances in yakuza films and his lead part in the controversial Kinji Fukasaku outing Battle Royale. (Some domestic film fans may also remember him from the Hollywood roles he has played in the '90s Keanu Reeves vehicle Johnny Mnemonic or the 1983 David Bowie film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence). Somewhat less well known in the West are his directorial efforts, though both Sonatine and Fireworks enjoyed a good critical reception and his blind swordsman remake Zatoichi did at least garner a theatrical release last year.
Also notable in his canon is the project which preceded that recent martial arts do over, the 2002 film Dolls. Nominated for a number of awards in its native Japan and well received on the international film festival circuit, this arty piece of cinema never got much of a chance to be seen in North America. Now, thanks to a new DVD release from Palm Pictures the movie gets a well-deserved domestic airing - and while it ultimately proved to be a bit of a mixed bag to these eyes, there’s undoubtedly enough of interest here to make this disk one that shouldn’t go completely unnoticed.
The film begins with a distancing gimmick from Takeshi Kitano that is much akin to the dance coda that concludes his latest effort. Here the device involves a scene depicting Japanese puppetry known as bunraku, an intricate art that consists of mid-sized puppets manipulated by multiple performers and accompanied by narration and music. This scene sets the stage for the events that will follow, and given its overt nature here (as well as the ways it is visually referenced later in the film and its prominent echo in the film’s English title) you’d have to be a pretty obtuse viewer to escape the sequence’s meaning. While this intro by itself proves an intriguing opening — not least to those who are unfamiliar with what looks to be a most interesting type of entertainment — its obvious nature also leads it to be slightly offputting in tone.
Once this bit of artistic artificiality is over, however, it’s on to the main tales of sadness and woe that make up the bulk of the film. There are three stories that comprise the plot, with the initial one centering on a young couple whose love falls apart when the man (Hidetoshi Nishijima) involved decides to marry the boss’s daughter instead of his true sweetheart (Miho Kanno). The day of the wedding ceremony takes an unexpected turn for this young man when his ex-girlfriend tries to kill herself with pills and ends up little more than a vegetative zombie. Wracked by guilt over what he has done, the potential groom leaves his betrothed at the altar and sets out to take care of this now mentally damaged young woman, thereby abandoning the successful business life he had begun to build for himself previously.
The struggle of this pair to get by on their own takes up most of the first hour of the film, and they eventually become wandering homeless whose paths will intersect obliquely with the two other main strands of the movie’s plot. The first of these is the story of an aging yakuza gangster (Tatsuya Mihashi) who in his younger days left behind his girlfriend (played by veteran actress Chieko Matsubara, best known as Chiharu in Seijun Suzuki’s brilliant Tokyo Drifter) on a park bench before setting out on his violent pathway of life. In a flashback scene, this girl is shown promising to bring lunch and wait for him every Saturday until he finally returns to her — which he eventually does, though he is loathe to admit just who he is. The other central tale here involves a beautiful pop star (Kyoko Fukada) whose disfigurement in an automobile accident both ends her singing career and allows an opening for one her most obsessed fans (Tsutomo Takeshige) to meet up with the object of his affection.
The way that these three stories are hung together in Dolls ultimately ended up feeling a bit forced, even while the material is in the main handled skillfully and is in fact shot in quite beautiful fashion overall. The entire outing is helmed with a detached drenched-in-symbols manner that is awash in resplendent color throughout, though whether or not the film appeals to the individual viewer may hinge on one's ability to accept this Takeshi Kitano aesthetic. There’s certainly plenty here to recommend the motion picture, as the cast is uniformly excellent and the director’s technical talents are unquestioned — but personally I have many of the same complaints about this film as I did with Zatoichi. There’s little doubt that the filmmaker is a meticulous craftsman whose settings and compositions are put together with the utmost care, but personally I’ll have to admit that Takeshi’s style often leaves me a bit cold.
Still and all, the fact that the director’s personal aesthetic comes sharply into conflict with mine is no good reason to toss out the entire effort in this instance. There’s the your-mileage-may-vary issue of course, so if the sort of formalistic rendering employed by Takeshi Kitano’s narrative here doesn’t strike you as slightly empty then you may find yourself cottoning to this one somewhat more than I did. Additionally, alongside the solid acting and great cinematography, there is at least some real emotional resonance to the stories and while they aren’t the most upbeat tales ever told, they do have a human depth that occasionally serves them well. The film’s use of color is also often breathtaking to behold — even when its symbolic implications might come in too heavy-handed a manner — and Palm’s widescreen transfer of the material into digital form allows the chromatic intensity to come through crisply.
Unfortunately, there’s little in the way of extras on this Dolls release to help add heft to the whole package as all you get added on is the theatrical trailer and a few previews for some other quality movies from the distributor. But regardless of that lack of bonus material, Asian film aficionados should still remain thankful that Palm has chosen to bring out this recent work by a man whose Japanese film career puts him among the top ranks of those working in the industry today. While I certainly can’t deny being slightly disappointed in both this outing and the equally abstract Zatoichi remake, that shouldn’t be misread as a dismissal of his oeuvre. For even if in the final assessment its penchant for over signifying mars the impact the venture, Dolls remains a cinematic outing that the Western world deserves to see.