Dolls

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Dolls

88% Liked It
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Dolls

Chieko Matsubara, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Kanji Tsuda, Kayoko Kishimoto, Kyôko Fukada

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 sto...( read more  read more... )ical 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

Id: 10976571

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Dolls Recent Reviews
  • DrBenway
    December 12, 2008
    DrBenway
    Takeshi Kitano brings us three stories about the decisions we make that affect our whole lives. The key element here is that we sometimes make the wrong decision due to emotions involved, not to mention pressure from others, and framed as a bunraku performance, Japan's national ...( read more)art-form involving elaborate puppets.

    Dolls is Kitano's quietest and most accomplished film so far, in my humble opinion. Given the unhappy consequences for many of the love-struck protaganists, this may lead the viewer to believe that the idea of love, although lasting, is bitter-sweet as Kitano goes from making his well known violent films to one of pain involving what we do to ourselves when we take the wrong path in life. Be careful what you wish forPhotobucket
  • DragonEyeMorrison
    January 18, 2008
    DragonEyeMorrison
    Drags a bit in some parts, yet Kitano knows how to keep things simple and direct to the point.
  • EarthlyAlien
    December 31, 2007
    EarthlyAlien
    I'll the risk gladly, but I'll say this: Dolls is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever! Takeshi Kitano is one of the most talented and brilliant filmmakers alive! I've seen every one of his films and the truth is that there isn't a single one that isn't at least...( read more) 'good'. I won't say Dolls is his best film, even though in my intimate it is my favourite one, side by side with Hana-bi, but it certainly is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen.

    Photobucket

    It might take some time and mind openness to fully get its greatness. Probably why some didn't get it at all... But there's no way you won't get blown away by this modern masterpiece. It's painfully beautiful, sad, melodic, depressing, realistic and visually astonishing! The rose garden scene is something close to sureal... Any aspiring filmmaker has to see Dolls. There's no going back there. It's pretty much a lesson of filmmaking... I can't help finding extremely transcendental that one single man (sensei Kitano) has imagined, wrote and directed this piece of pure, genuine ART...

    Like Kitano or not (or even know him at all), if you truly love Cinema than you can't, just can't, miss this wonderful film!
  • mvieaddict
    October 10, 2009
    mvieaddict
    When I started to watch Dolls, in the first 10 minutes I wanted to close it down, was for me an odd movie and way too slow.But being a movie of Kitano I wanted to give it a try and as the movie went on I started to like it. There was no happy ending in this movie. But it was a mo...( read more)ving film, that will have you thinking about the depth of love. In most romantic dramas, there was sex, not in this one, but still Kitano could show you the depths of love without the sex part. There was little dialogue, so made me pay more attention what was really going on. Overall, it was a bitter three human stories.
  • cacutshaw
    February 25, 2007
    cacutshaw
    Beautiful and tragic Kitano movie with seperate stories all involving heartbreak. A wonderful yet sad viewing experience.
  • meredithdias
    December 19, 2009
    meredithdias
    Beautiful, beautiful movie.
  • Phonex
    December 13, 2009
    Phonex
    "Dolls" is from the very first shot conceptual Japanese. It echoes Shinoda's "Double Suicide" by also to open in a bunraku theatre. But where Shinoda opens with Chikamatsu's "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki" and lets his puppets become human and the theatre become reality, Kitano o...( read more)pens with "The Courier for Hell" (Meido No Kikaku) and lets the puppets become the spectators to the real world. Where Shinoda lets the puppets become humans to continue the tale, Kitano disrupts the tale and makes a transition to the two lovers, the leashed beggars, walking down an avenue of cherry trees in blossom; laughed at and misunderstood by the young, recognized and mourned by the elderly, mocked by the kids. In a way, the leased beggars are like the puppets.
  • kluroda01
    November 23, 2009
    kluroda01
    classic cinema... gorgeous in every respect.. but 3 very sad tales :)
  • underwearsoup
    November 19, 2009
    underwearsoup
    You know usually I'm very open towards these kinds of films, what I mean by that is that I'm usually open when filmmakers try new things, to broaden their horizons, to just make a different film than what people are used to seeing from you. It's something that, I'm sure, filmmak...( read more)ers take great pleasure in doing as it keeps their careers from feeling stale. With that said, but I was just really bored by this movie. Plus it didn't exactly fit in with the theme of today's marathon, well it had SOME of it in there but like I said, this movie is the odd one out of the movies I picked for the marathon. But yea, I was just bored by this movie, there's like literally next-to-nothing going on here. The storylines, while interesting on paper, just don't come across that well on screen. They're not fully developed and they just come up falling short. Like what was the point of the pop-star and the blind man in the movie, it just seemed really pointless. The only real interesting story was the yakuza boss one and that had an anticlimatic ending, which makes sense considering the Boss' profession, but still anticlimactic (same as the pop-star/blind man ending). Also the fact of the matter is that the main story line, of the couple bound together was just a pace killer, literally every time they came on I would just shrug because it would literally detach me from everything else that was going on in the movie and I just couldn't care any less for these two. Sure the movie's cinematography is really impressive, but it really isn't enough to make the movie good, it's really just average at best. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't encourage Takeshi Kitano to do more movies like these, just to make sure they're interesting, because filmmakers nowadays need to take risks even if they fail, it might help revitalize their careers.
  • ElCochran90
    September 11, 2009
    ElCochran90
    Kitano's most harmonic and beautiful achievement about separated stories that deal with human beings and their deep psychology.

    88/100
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