Takeshi Kitano has always been perhaps the strangest of film artists, a moving combination of extreme violence and extreme tenderness -- a sort of Japanese mix of Peckinpah and Max Ophuls. Who else, other than Nicholas Ray, can claim such range? Dolls -- released to empty Tokyo houses back in 2002 and at last making it to the cinematically barren shores of the USA in '05 (for one week) -- is Kitano at his most tender. Three stories are interwoven, and the dolls of the title refer to those among us -- a vanishing breed -- whose depth of love is too strong for the world: they live in a world beyond ours. Characters such as these once held a primary place in the focus of world art. (Balzac made a career of them.) No more, outside of hearts such as Kitano's. Much in this movie, I imagine, comes from his life. The aging Yakuza (wonderfully played by Tatsuya Mihashi) is Kitano the guilty husband. The lonely idol disfigured by car accident leads us back to Kitano's near-death in a motorcycle crack-up. Perhaps the forsaken woman embodied by Chieko Matsubara and the main character Sawako (Miho Kanno) is the director's dual valentine of apology to his loyal (and constantly betrayed) wife. Where it comes from does not matter. What does are some of the most moving moments in all cinema: the fade out on the groupie madly in love with the pretty pop star, as he rocks out, headphones on, alone in his bedroom; the moment of recognition by Mihashi as he sees Matsubara still waiting for him, years later, at their chosen bench; Sawako holding up her angel necklace, as she and her lover gaze back into time, seeing the moment when the necklace was first given to her; the groupie and pop star "smelling the roses"; and the incomparable moment when Matsumoto, Miho Kanno's betrayer, realizes his fate is forever linked to hers -- because of the betrayal -- as he leads her toward the road they must travel together. . .
Kitano's films have often been about the struggle to protect love (romantic and fraternal) through violence. Hana-bi (translation: Fire Flower) is the greatest of these. In Dolls, there is no violence. Only the sadness at the end of all roads taken to embody love, at the cost of everything else. The music by Joe Hisaishi and the photography by Katsumi Yanagijima are beyond compare, in one of the very few great films of the 21st-century.
