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Dolls [2003]
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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 DVD Technical Information:
RRP: £19.99
Our Price: £8.97 (subject to change)
Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
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.
Editorial
DVD Description
Cult director Takeshi Kitano weaves together three visually stunning and deeply touching stories of undying love inspired by traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre. The first story concerns a rising young executive who turned his back on his girlfriend in pursuit of his career. Following a failed suicide attempt, which leaves her in a mindless daze, he runs to his former love’s side and now they roam the country together, bound by a red cord, in search of something they have lost. The second is about an ageing yazuka who also abandoned his girlfriend for the sake of success. 30 years later, he is compelled to return to the park where they used to meet. The final tale is of a former pop star who becomes a recluse following a disfiguring accident. One day, one of her greatest fans comes to prove the extent of his devotion to her …
Editorial
Special Features
Editorial
Synopsis
DOLLS comprises three touching stories of true love, directed by Takeshi Kitano. The first installment tells the story of a career-driven man who gives up his girlfriend in favour of his job. She attempts suicide and he returns to her, and they roam the country together in search of whatever it is they have lost. The second story also concerns abandonment in favour of success. The man in question returns to the park where they met 30 years later. The last tale in the trilogy is of a disfigured former pop star, reclusive due to her disability, who is visited by her greatest fan, eager to show the extent to which he loves her.
Editorial
Empire
"Visually brilliant … impossible to resist"
Editorial
Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound
"A shamelessly gorgeous creation, aesthetically and formally daring"
Editorial
Uncut
"A stunning, lyrical masterpiece … bizarre and beautiful"
Touching
Review date: 2006-04-05 Rating: 10 out of 10
I loved this movie! Everything about it from the acting (or lack of in that the actors act like marionettes and therefore with very little facial expression) It's beautiful with interconnections between different stories and different peoples lives that find a commen cord.
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Reviews
"Poetic"? You Betcha!
Review date: 2005-10-27 Rating: 6 out of 10
I'd love to join the Amazon reviewers awarding this peculiar film five stars, but to be honest this art-house product isn't going to please all film fans: even those few in the market for a movie in Japanese entirely devoid of swordplay, martial arts and (but for some very brief scenes) guns.
Takeshi Kitano here delivers a purely aesthetic experience: three moving but somewhat twisted love stories, beautifully filmed and acted but unsettlingly devoid of traditional "cathartic release". If you liked the painting scenes in "Hana-Bi" or the geisha's dance in "Zatoichi", then you may well love this. If, on the other hand, you liked the bloody massacres in "Hana-Bi" and stylish dismemberments in "Zatoichi", this is best avoided.
Personally I enjoyed it, but - hey! - I think that "Interiors" is a pretty good Woody Allen film ...
Puppets are as big as life and humans are as small as death
Review date: 2005-01-15 Rating: 10 out of 10
This Japanese film is probably the most disturbing and disquieting film I have seen in many months or even years, and yet also one of the most Japanese films I have ever admired and enjoyed, that naturally came from Japan. The rhythm say some is slow. In fact it is real. Long shots, long sequences of people in real time, in the time of real reality. Nothing virtual about it. Then pictures, landscapes, urbanscapes, moutainscapes that are breathtaking by their beauty, for sure, but also their density and symbolic value. From one sequence to the next, from one scene to the next, symbolical elements are entertwined with the utmost art and delicacy, fineness and minuteness. These symbolical elements that run through the film are extremely difficult to capture, and yet the eye picks them, recognizes them and it is quite a pleasure to shift from one situation to the next without a complete break, with a constant reference from one to the others. The integration of Bunraku « puppets » is a marvellous idea and effect. The puppets become alive into the characters and the characters become dead into the puppets that are alive in spite of the inertia that is theirs, an inertia that can only be moved by three manipulators per puppet, one actor and one musician. That is a lot of people behind the china and cloth actors. And that is not all. The film reveals the deep layers of universal consciousness in front of love, death and life. Love cannot be escaped and if you try to do so, you will have to pay. Death cannot be imposed onto any one, and if one tries to do so on his neighbour, sooner or later, he will meet with this death in his own life. Life cannot be transformed into a game, because it is not a game. If you try to become the slave of such a game, of such a fancy, of such a mania, you will have to face life in the eyes and death will ensue. And the film closes, or nearly on the final image of the main metaphor : love, when betrayed, becomes an enslavement, a mendicant's fate, a couple of lost souls forever tied up and led on the road to the past to their truth, to falling into some an abyss, and dying not in one another's arms but dangling like two mangled pieces of game side to side in midair. And the hunter is that great leveller of our world, that great justice-maker of our world, that life-love-death, the triple goddess of so many mythologies, the trinity of so many religions, the triad of so many imaginations, that looms in the sky of our vanity immense, eternal and unfathomable.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
AWESOME!!!
Review date: 2003-11-23 Rating: 10 out of 10
I was lucky enough to see this film on big screen but viewing it on a smaller screen doesn't take away the original beauty of this film! it is TOTALLY awe inspiring, a film i hope you all have the chance to see.
not quite what you'd expect....
Review date: 2003-09-27 Rating: 10 out of 10
Written and directed by, but not starring the multi talented, hardest working person in show-biz, Takeshi Kitano, Dolls is a film that will surprise anyone with preconceptions. Book-ended by a Japanese puppet theatre show, telling a tragic love story, the film tells three stories in Kitano Takeshi's almost trade-mark style, but with subtle differences. There is violence, but the viewer only sees the results. There is an almost Sakamoto-esque soundtrack. The main story centres on a couple roped together as they walk through the four seasons and beautifully shot surroundings ( an abundance of blossoms, autumnal maple leaves and crisp snow). Two other stories cross at tangents; a Yakuza clan boss who left his girlfriend years before, only to find she had kept her promise to him, and a disturbingly avid fan of a pop star, who goes to extraordinary lengths to meet the star after she retires from public life after an accident. There are many images to help tell the stories, but there is no superfluous dialogue to get in the way or distract the viewer from the smallest details to the stunning landscapes that are more than mere backdrops. All tell of how devoted love can make a person. All tell how futile the same love can become.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Tatsuya Mihashi
Kyôko Fukada
Hidetoshi Nishijima
Miho Kanno
Chieko Matsubara
Creators:
Miho Kanno (Primary Contributor)
Hidetoshi Nishijima (Primary Contributor)
Director(s):
Recording label: Artificial Eye
Manufacturer: Artificial Eye
EAN: 5021866259307
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL, Widescreen,
Release date: 2003-11-24
Number of discs: 1
Audience rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 113 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2002
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: Japanese (Original Language)