I had not originally intended to write about Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, since it had wide international release and has been often discussed by other writers. However, after I have now seen hundreds of other Japanese movies, the film seems to take on a different significance than when I first saw it.
Dolls was not the first of Kitano’s movies in which he did not appear even in a passing cameo, but in retrospect it seems to have been his most ambitious. Not only does he pay far more attention to composition and beauty than in his earlier films, he also seems to be synthesizing both his own earlier work as well as the entire history of Japanese drama and film-making.
Like Shinoda’s Double Suicide, the movie begins with a bunraku performance, this time of Chikamatsu’s play usually translated as Courier for Hell. That play’s kabuki version had been adapted earlier by Uchida, but after we have seen the play’s famous “flight” scene with the puppets,
we move to modern dress and live actors where Kitano inverts the story to that of a young salaryman Matsumoto who has deserted his fiancée Sawako to marry the boss’s daughter. Hearing at the church steps that Sawako has attempted suicide but failed, he walks out and takes it upon himself to care for the now child-like Sawako. Since she often wanders away, he ties a rope around both their waists and when his money ends they begin to wander the country, becoming famous as the “bound beggars.”
The movie becomes an anthology movie as, in the course of their walks, they cross the paths of two other pairs of lovers. One is a woman who has herself become locally famous because every Saturday she shows up on the same park bench with two bento boxes waiting for her boyfriend to join her. He, meanwhile, has become a yakuza boss and now facing his own sense of coming death at last goes back to the bench. The woman lives next door to a young man to whom she always gives the uneaten bento box. He is madly in love at a distance with a cute pop idol. When she goes into seclusion after a car crash that has permanently scarred her face, he blinds himself so that she will allow him a solitary visit.
To anyone familiar with Kitano’s earlier movies, we can see obvious reworking of earlier themes in the main stories and in some minor characters – the lover who has lost her mind and must be cared for like a child on a trip as well as the sense of obligation to a partner from Hana-bi, the yakuza world with the sudden violence of his earliest movies, the physical disabilities of Scene at the Sea. The ocean appears significantly as it has in all his movies, and a brief flashback even shows us a couple with a surfboard. Characters speak rarely and when they do it is almost always directly facing forward. It also touches on Kitano’s own life as a performer of great fame who almost lost his career and life in a road accident.
His development as a painter after his accident has now made him much more aware of color and of traditional Japanese ideas of beauty. The individual shots are spare, the colors strong and solid as if from woodblocks, except in the forest scenes where turning leaves provide a lushly colorful background. It is often a gorgeous movie.
The dolls at the beginning become on-lookers at several points and eventually the walkers don versions of the doll character costumes that we see at the beginning. This has encouraged many commentators to see the characters as victims of fate, their lives manipulated just as are those of the bunraku dolls, but that does not seem to be the case as the stories work themselves out. Dolls is more about the nature of love and responsibility, and more specifically the responsibility of those who are loved to those who have loved them. This theme had begun to surface in Kitano’s films after his near death experience, most obviously in Scene at the Sea, the husband’s devotion in Hana-bi, and the search for the young boy’s absent mother in Kikujiro (where the gangster forced to become a substitute father for the little boy searching for the mother who has abandoned him uses the name of Kitano’s own emotionally absent father).
This is reflected in the changes Kitano made to his source material. In Chikamatsu’s play, the lovers run away together but are caught, the man executed and the woman forced back into prostitution. In the yakuza film, we see a version of the Musashi Miyamoto story, with Otsu waiting patiently at the bridge for the lover who does not return, as he goes about his battles to reach the top of a violent world. The pop idol story is a variant on the oft-filmed Otoko and Sasuke in which the servant blinds himself to be closer to the female musician he adores. In Kitano’s version, the two lovers run away forever, eternally bound, the yakuza’s waiting woman does not recognize him when he at last returns, and the music fan is killed in a road accident after only one brief, all but silent, meeting with his idol. Nevertheless, the person loved has destroyed the life of the person who loves him or her and they are all bound beggars, tied together just as firmly as the two young people dragging their red rope.
Anyone familiar with Kitano’s movies would recognize it immediately as a Kitano film from the lack of dialogue, the minimal emotional expression, the scenes often filmed from directly front. Yet it is now different, much more fluid. I say this as an outsider who knows Japan only from its movies and some reading, but it seems that for the first (and possibly the only) time, Kitano has made not a Kitano movie but a Japanese movie. Just as he has adapted three famous Japanese story lines, he has adopted much more of the traditional Japanese film vocabulary. The camera now has a Mizoguchi-like fluidity within many of his longer scenes that he had previously filmed with a static camera, and the long walks followed so carefully remind us of Shimizu’s constant walkers. He picks up the overt theatricality that has been a constant thread in Japanese color films and which he had always avoided previously. He controls his color palette like Kinugasa yet allows only the countryside to expand his reds and yellows that in other scenes are played against the blankness of the city or snow and sand. The pace is slow, the whole movie at the pace of the two walkers, moving at the speed of Ozu without Ozu’s low camera, a pacing now found in Japanese film only among Kitano’s non-violent contemporaries like Kore’eda.
Though there is still some of Kitano’s signature violence, it all happens off-screen; even the yakuza section shows us only the bodies after an assassination attempt, not the shooting itself, and we do not see the blind man’s accident, only his body lying on the sidewalk by the road. Though close-ups now appear, Kitano still favors the middle or long shot, heavily center-weighted.
For the first time that I can recall, he also seems to find himself in opposition to contemporary Japanese culture. The pop song is so insipid it hardly qualifies as an ear-worm, and the wedding the young man runs away from is in a blank Christian church with a bride in white. Each character finds their true life away from the city, the bound couple wandering farther into the snowy mountains, the park bench isolated by a bridge and greenery, and the pop idol alone at the beach. He had visited these settings in earlier films, of course, with the Okinawan beach and greenery and his trip with his wife to a mountain spa in Hana-bi, yet he had also always portrayed himself as a city man who was only temporarily hiding, somehow still uncomfortable in such settings. Now, without his presence as an actor, the settings themselves become characters. And the settings are beautiful, both in themselves and in the way he places his characters within them.
He also seems to have abandoned his loose rep company. Almost none of the cast and none of the principals have appeared in his earlier movies.
Unfortunately, Kitano’s own distaste for or lack of comfort with dialogue means we get some very crude exposition and no detailed characterization. We go far beyond the traditional Japanese repression of emotions into blank-faced silence for almost everyone, so that the dolls, though voiced by the bunraku narrator, seem to speak more than Kitano’s characters. Some characters are introduced but seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor, particularly in the yakuza section with its unexplained qaudriplegic in his motorized wheelchair and the young yakuza bodyguard who is carefully introduced but who seems to have no real function other than to wear a red shirt that visually ties the story to the reds of the other two stories. The ending for the two dolls is so absurdly beyond either fate or accident as to undercut everything that has gone before, a final deadpan joke that Kitano simply couldn’t resist in a movie that otherwise generally avoided his typical blank, childish humor.
Thus, as so often with Kitano, we are left with an enigma, a film that is both very personal yet impersonal. It is more ambitious in its reach than any of his other movies, but despite its often gorgeous photography by Kitano regular Katsumi Yanagijima and perfect music provided by Joe Hisaishi, the unfulfilled ambition seems to make the whole less satisfying than we feel it ought to be, an almost masterpiece but only almost.
Japanonfilm 
Pingback: Zatoichi (2003) | Japanonfilm