Dolls, 4 stars

Yes, this is directed by that Takeshi. Coming into this movie I knew its director as the man responsible for "Takeshi's Castle", a Japanese physical challenge show whose low points were then overdubbed MST3K-style by two American comedians to form the SpikeTV show "MXC". However, I had seen none of his films although I knew that he had a successful film career in Japan.

*THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS IN MY REVIEW. I CANNOT DISCUSS HOW AFFECTING THIS FILM WAS WITHOUT GIVING AWAY MAJOR PLOT POINTS.*

This film did not let me down, although the leap from fat men in ill-fitting helmets smacking their faces into giant logs to a stately, quiet drama about the absence of free will was not a small one. This was everything I was not expecting it to be and was instead a well-observed if slightly manipulative meditation on loss and choice. There are three storylines, each dealing with a character who has failed to act decisively at a crucial moment. The first storyline deals with a young man who is very much in love and engaged to the woman he cares so much for. However, he bows to pressure from his parents and breaks up with her to marry the boss' daughter for business reasons. On his wedding day, he hears that she has attempted suicide and does not recognize anyone now. He takes responsibility for her, and as her instability causes them to become more and more outcast, they begin wandering the countryside tied together with a length of red rope. In one of the film's most moving moments, when the couple stands outside the house where they announced their engagement, the girl makes a gesture to show that she recognizes her former love as the man who has been caring for her all this time. I actually gasped aloud a little at the simplicity and tenderness of this moment and how it was handled.

The second, and most moving for me, of the stories concerns an aging yakuza boss who had made a fateful decision years ago to abandon a woman he loved because he felt he could not give her the life she deserved. She tells him she will wait for him every day on a certain park bench and bring a lunch for him in case he ever decides to join her. From the looks of the characters 20 years or more pass, and then the boss decides to see if his former love still waits for him. To his surprise, she has apparently been lunching on the same park bench in the intervening years, still awaiting his return. The moment when he sits beside her and she does not recognize him was for me the most affecting in the film, a nearly perfect reversal of the moment I described above in the first story.

The third and least successful story concerns a Japanese pop star who is blinded one day in an accident that may have been caused by a daydreaming fan of hers who happened to be a traffic cop at a busy intersection. The fan blinds himself in a final effort to be closer to his idol, and one day manages to finagle a meeting with her at last, when he can no longer see her.

The film is gorgeously shot and could serve as a primer in a class called "Shooting Autumn Leaves Attractively Yet Ambiguously". The first two stories are quite affecting and all three make very good points about the role of choice in happiness. This was quite a pleasant surprise considering that I was expecting a crime film, or failing that, a straightforward film of any type. Instead I found a elliptical, nonlinear gem that also opens and closes with two moving scenes of bunraku. While all characters in the film become dolls in their own indecision, the film's effect on us is anything but, reminding us how to be more human than the characters Kitano has created.