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Living Dolls
Takeshi Kitano’s bunraku experience
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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The traditional doll theater known as bunraku is alive and well in Japan, as I can testify, having seen a bunraku performance of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki in Fukuoka, Japan, a month ago. (An 18th-century playwright, Chikamatsu was the foremost author of bunraku plays.) Watching the performance made it clear that in so nakedly conventional a form of theater, identification, a bugbear often cited in discussions of narrative, was put out of play. I neither shared the characters’ emotions nor rejected them. What continued to operate was the old Aristotelian couple of pity and terror, in no way hindered by the use of dolls to represent humans. In fact, the dolls added a special jolt to the excitement of finding the arbitrary and the inevitable at work together one more time. In Dolls, Takeshi Kitano sets out to recapture, and transpose, some aspects of the bunraku experience. The film starts (after part of a performance of another Chikamatsu play, The Courier for Hell) with a simple reversal: this time, the dolls are the spectators, watching humans perform three interwoven tales of doomed love. Inaccessibility is the condition of the relationship in each story. Matsumoto, a young man whose parents have talked him into marrying his boss’s daughter, learns at his wedding that the girlfriend he dumped, Sawako, has suffered brain damage in a suicide attempt. Only now that she’s lost the capacity to remember him does he decide to devote his life to her. The heroine of the second story fails to recognize the person (a yakuza boss) who sits next to her on a park bench as the departed lover for whose return she has waited for decades. In the third story, the opportunity for the obsessed Nukui to speak with and walk beside his pop-star idol comes at the cost of his eyes: only when the singer, herself now disfigured, learns that Nukui is blind does she permit him to approach her. Kitano preserves the element of social critique in Chikamatsu by locating the three stories of Dolls in settings characteristic of late capitalism: the world of the struggling middle class; the world of yakuza, with its violent and inexplicable betrayals; the world of pop celebrity and its alienated fans. In the pretty vacuousness of the pop star, he finds a contemporary living doll — a facile metaphor, perhaps, but he bolsters it with the implicit comparison between the representational scheme of bunraku and the televisual style of the singer’s stage show. The film Dolls most brings to mind — without at all resembling it — is Max Ophuls’s La ronde, in which a series of romantic couples act out miniature rituals of seduction and abandonment under the supervision of a sardonic master of ceremonies. Ophuls’s lovers are manipulated (by their emotions and their obligations) into fulfilling roles that have been written for them (by the organization of society and by the place it reserves for love as an exception), but they fail to realize this fact: the awareness that they should have belongs instead to the master of ceremonies. For Kitano, his characters’ awareness or lack of awareness is beside the point. His people are more manipulated and more passive than Ophuls’s, though also less deluded. They define themselves as victims and harden into types, figures to be pointed at and labeled. (Sawako and Matsumoto, connected by a rope tied to their waists, become legendary as "the bound beggars.") Kitano time-shifts and scatters images with his usual assurance and with a blunt sensuousness that’s far from the cerebralism of Alain Resnais, or that of Michel Gondry. He indulges all his stylistic penchants in Dolls: his love of playing movement and stasis off each other; his interest in scenes of people walking or standing around; his ritualistic choreography of the everyday. It’s a lovely film, a paean to the natural beauty of Japan; a personal film; and, though the novelty of its premise might seem to threaten a major statement, an intentionally small film.
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