Cheap Dolls / Kukly - PAL (DVD) (Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Mishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara, Kyoko Fukada) (Takeshi Kitano) Price

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Customer Reviews of Dolls / Kukly - PAL

Death is the supreme heaven of Love
This Japanese film is probably the most disturbing and disquieting film I have seen in many months or even years, and yet also one of the most Japanese films I have ever admired and enjoyed, that naturally came from Japan. The rhythm say some is slow. In fact it is real. Long shots, long sequences of people in real time, in the time of real reality. Nothing virtual about it. Then pictures, landscapes, urbanscapes, moutainscapes that are breathtaking by their beauty, for sure, but also their density and symbolic value. From one sequence to the next, from one scene to the next, symbolical elements are entertwined with the utmost art and delicacy, fineness and minuteness. These symbolical elements that run through the film are extremely difficult to capture, and yet the eye picks them, recognizes them and it is quite a pleasure to shift from one situation to the next without a complete break, with a constant reference from one to the others. The integration of Bunraku � puppets � is a marvellous idea and effect. The puppets become alive into the characters and the characters become dead into the puppets that are alive in spite of the inertia that is theirs, an inertia that can only be moved by three manipulators per puppet, one actor and one musician. That is a lot of people behind the china and cloth actors. And that is not all. The film reveals the deep layers of universal consciousness in front of love, death and life. Love cannot be escaped and if you try to do so, you will have to pay. Death cannot be imposed onto any one, and if one tries to do so on his neighbour, sooner or later, he will meet with this death in his own life. Life cannot be transformed into a game, because it is not a game. If you try to become the slave of such a game, of such a fancy, of such a mania, you will have to face life in the eyes and death will ensue. And the film closes, or nearly on the final image of the main metaphor : love, when betrayed, becomes an enslavement, a mendicant's fate, a couple of lost souls forever tied up and led on the road to the past to their truth, to falling into some an abyss, and dying not in one another's arms but dangling like two mangled pieces of game side to side in midair. And the hunter is that great leveller of our world, that great justice-maker of our world, that life-love-death, the triple goddess of so many mythologies, the trinity of so many religions, the triad of so many imaginations, that looms in the sky of our vanity immense, eternal and unfathomable. <
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>Dr Jacques COULARDEAU <
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Takeshi Kitano's best so far?
Having been hooked on 'Beat' Takeshi's stuff since experiencing 'Violent Cop' back in the early 90's, I would rank this as one of his best films so far. <
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> 'Beat' Takeshi, just in case you don't know, is something of an enigma, renowned for being smart enough to have made his fortune in Japan with his appearacnes in infantile game shows, and intelligent enough to make films such as this one. <
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> Generally, his films are leisurely-paced yakuza flicks with themes of mental instability, and occasional undercurrents of homosexuality (eg. Boiling Point, Violent Cop). Here, he makes a stylistic departure by blending the action with the storyline of a 'Bunraku' (puppet doll) play, somewhat in the same fashion as 'Being John Malkovich', but with more snowstorms. <
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> The film follows the course of the four seasons in Japan, in a very subtle way, and is as visually stunning as it is emotionally gut-wrenching. Slower than Kitano's usual stuff (with the possible exception of 'Sonatine'), but all the more powerful for it. <
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> Note to students of Japanese: I first saw this in London, with a few Japanese friends, who were as mystified as I by the brief snatches of Bunraku dialogue. So don't reach for the seppuku sword, if you can't follow these parts without subtitles.