Dolls
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 fiancée (Sawako, played by Miho Kanno) to marry the daughter of his company's president. When his former fiancée attempts suicide and ends up in a semi-vegetative state, he takes her out of the hospital and they run away.
Another young man (Nukui, played by Tsutomu Takeshige) is obsessed with the pop-star Haruna (played by Kyoko Fukada); he blinds himself when she is involved in a disfiguring car accident.
An aged yakuza (Hiro, played by Tatsuya Mihashi), who tries to meet a 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 on which the film centers. The film leads into it by opening with a performance of Bunraku theatre, and closes with a shot of dolls from the same. The performance is that of "The Courier for Hell" by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and it alludes to themes that reappear later in the film. 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, but there is a strong visual emphasis on the changing of the seasons and the bonds of love over the progression of time (Matsumoto and Sawako spend most of the film physically connected by a red rope).
romantic, psychedelic