Dolls is a film directed by the Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, released in 2002.

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 fiancee (Sawako, played by Miho Kanno ) to marry the daughter of his company's president. When his former fiancee attempts suicide, he rescues her from 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.

The film has been praised for being visually impressive, and features costumes by Yohji Yamamoto .

Unlike other films by Kitano, he did not star in Dolls.

External links

• Official site (Japanese)