Dolls (film)

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For the 1987 film, see Dolls (1987 film).

Dolls

Directed by	Takeshi Kitano
Written by	Takeshi Kitano
Starring	Miho Kanno Hidetoshi Nishijima
Music by	Joe Hisaishi
Release date(s)	2002
Running time	114 min
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
IMDb profile

Dolls (ドールズ, dōruzu^?) is a 2002 film directed by Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano. A highly stylized art film, Dolls is a departure for Kitano, who normally makes gangster films, and unlike most of his other films, he does not act in it. The film has been praised for its cinematography and features costumes by Yohji Yamamoto.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film features three primary sets of characters, each within their own distinct story:

A young man (Matsumoto, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) who rejects his engagement to his fiancée (Sawako, played by Miho Kanno) to marry the daughter of his company's president. When his former fiancée attempts suicide, he takes her out of the hospital she is taken to and they run away.
Another young man (Nukui, played by Tsutomu Takeshige), who is obsessed with the pop-star Haruna (played by Kyoko Fukada), and blinds himself when she is involved in a disfiguring car accident.
An aged yakuza (Hiro, played by Tatsuya Mihashi), who tries to meet the girlfriend from his youth (played by Chieko Matsubara).

These stories do have some incidental visual cross-over with each other in the film, but are mostly separate. The first story is the one the film centres around. The film leads into it by opening with a performance of Bunraku theatre, and closes with a shot of dolls from the same. Because the rest of the film itself (as Kitano himself has said) can be treated as Bunraku in film form, the film is quite symbolic. In some cases, it is not clear whether a particular scene is meant to be taken literally. The film is also not in strict chronological order.