While he’s perhaps best known for staging unhinged musical interpretations of samurai myth in Zatôichi and orchestrating teen mayhem in Battle Royale, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano has long been one of Japan’s great filmmakers.
All the world’s woe is a stage for Kitano in the melancholy Dolls, which punctuates its three stories of love lost, found and lost again with traditional Bunraku puppet theatre. Like the marionettes used here as metaphor, Kitano’s characters are fragile souls manipulated by subtle forces beyond their control. Doomed lovers wander the landscape bound together by a red cord, a Yakuza boss channels a lifetime of regret into pining for an elusive love, and a J-pop star is brought closer to a fan when her beauty fractures. There’s a clinical stillness to the way Kitano suggests the inevitability of loss, his always-arresting visuals and the disembodied, ambient soundtrack framing the characters at a quizzical distance. It’s a slow and minimalist film, and, like those of Kitano’s American kindred spirit Jim Jarmusch, one that stays with you.
All the world’s woe is a stage for Kitano in the melancholy Dolls, which punctuates its three stories of love lost, found and lost again with traditional Bunraku puppet theatre. Like the marionettes used here as metaphor, Kitano’s characters are fragile souls manipulated by subtle forces beyond their control. Doomed lovers wander the landscape bound together by a red cord, a Yakuza boss channels a lifetime of regret into pining for an elusive love, and a J-pop star is brought closer to a fan when her beauty fractures. There’s a clinical stillness to the way Kitano suggests the inevitability of loss, his always-arresting visuals and the disembodied, ambient soundtrack framing the characters at a quizzical distance. It’s a slow and minimalist film, and, like those of Kitano’s American kindred spirit Jim Jarmusch, one that stays with you.
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