Dolls, directed by Kitano Takeshi in 2002, is an emotionally haunting and sentimentally moving masterpiece that delivers three intertwined tragedies with a sense of aesthetic beauty. The genre of the film can be classified in either drama or romance, and using romance as its means to convey the dangerous nature of love. The film departs from Kitano’s well-known gangster thrilling style, in which violence is prevalent, and implicitly presents itself as a new kind of brutality that involves psychological pain and silent bloodshed. ]
The film involves three episodes of tragic love stories, that are all short in length and with a common theme that make them intertwine in illustrating the jeopardy of blind love and sacrifice. First story beings with the “bound beggars,” a young couple are tied to each other with a vivid red rope; they are stumbling with no destiny throughout the four seasons, mourning for what they have lost in a tragedy. The second story surrounds the life of a yakuza boss, as he returns to the park in the hope of encountering his long-past girl friend and is murdered upon his departure. The third story involves a blind sacrifice of a fan to a pop star, and his ultimate heartbreaking fate.
The film features amazing view of the landscape and vivid blend of colors that are stimulating to the viewers’ sight and causes the viewers to be incredibly attracted to the brilliant scenery of the background. The stories are told through images instead of dialogue or action-filled character interactions. Kitano is wise to utilize the beauty of the scenery to contrast the agony shared by the characters, as they stand out from the landscape due to the irreversibility of their bliss that is incongruent to the splendor background. However, Kitano also dresses the characters in bright colors that match the color of nature and of the amazing scenery they are in, suggesting that the characters are still well blended within the physical surrounding, but their psychological pain separates them from such perfection, to the extreme, the opposite of what is around them. Such as the character Sawako is often dressed in scarlet red that blends into the bright red of the maple leaf valley. As we speak, the choice of color is also prominent throughout the film, such as the prevalent color red dominates the film from beginning to end. The color red repetitively reinforces the notion of threat and tragic fate through blood, red maple leaf, red rose blooming field, red dress, and red rope. The film is largely silent and motionless; however, the hint of red in the background is so stimulating to the sight that it serves as a reminder to the viewers of the fatalness of blind love even with the absence of explicit violence.
The order of events is also outstandingly presented with the use of analogy and flashback. First of all, the film both starts and ends with the puppet theater play, which suggests the strong connection between the play and the lives of the characters. The film opens with a bunraku performance involving puppet prologue, a scene from Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s “The Courier from Hell.” The puppet theater play illustrates a courtesan begging her lover to stop committing foolishness for her sake, which not only directly echoes the name of the film (Dolls) but also serves to foreshadow the tragic fate of the stories that are about to follow. In the end, the young couple from the first story change their clothes to the customs of the puppet dolls, further indicating an explicit link between the couple and the courtesan and her love, and generalizing the same connection to the other characters within the film and the stories are intertwined in nature. The use of flashback also is commonly facilitated by Kitano, such as the flashback of the young couple’s joyful moments in the past while they are in the presence of utter sadness wandering in the snow. Flashback, thus, serves to reinforce the inevitable fate and the irritability of reality; this intensifies the despair of the characters and provokes the viewers’ sympathy to them.
The film is emotionally moving by integrating the brilliant view of the background with limited dialogues among the characters in conveying a sense of stillness and despair, forcing the viewers to bear with the heavy atmosphere. Despite the fact that there are scenes of bloodshed, the film is not recommended for those who seek thrilling action. Overall, Dolls is a legendary work that transforms physical violence to a form of silent brutality; it is beautiful yet depressing, gentle yet fatal.