A red cord unites them, a physical bond that is the outward manifestation of an inner tie, irrevocable and tragic. To see them cross the landscapes of Japan, the "bound beggars," is to witness a piece of living performance art, a Zen Kōan on the nature of love and regret that unspools through the four seasons. Matsumoto and Sawako, joined by that scarlet ribbon which is as much an umbilical cord as a noose, are not merely characters; they are an icon, the heartbreaking emblem of a cinema—that of Takeshi Kitano—which here abandons the explosive violence of his yakuza-eiga to explore a brutality of an entirely different nature: that of the heart. "Dolls" (2002) is the aesthetic vanishing point in Kitano’s filmography, a work of a formal beauty so dazzling it becomes almost painful, a visual poem that deliberately places itself outside narrative conventions to become pure signifier.

The film opens and closes on the stage of the Bunraku theatre, the ancient Japanese art of puppetry. This is no exotic flourish, but the keystone, the metatextual declaration of intent for the entire enterprise. Like the ningyō (the puppets), manipulated in plain sight by three puppeteers dressed in black, the characters of "Dolls" are moved by invisible strings: those of Fate, of past choices, of a love so absolute it becomes a destructive force. Kitano tells us from the outset that we will not be witnessing a story of free will, but a ritualistic representation of human suffering. The protagonists of the three interwoven stories—the two wandering lovers, an old yakuza boss who returns to the haunts of his youth, and a fan obsessed with a disfigured pop idol—are all trapped in a compulsion to repeat, prisoners of an idealized image of love that the present can only betray. Theirs is not a life, but the performance of a tragedy already written, a shinjū (lovers' double suicide) drawn out across time and space.

This formal, almost hieratic, structure marks a radical departure from the Kitano of Sonatine or Hana-bi. There, violence was a sudden flash in a contemplative stasis; here, the contemplative stasis is itself the violence. Dialogue is pared down to the bare minimum, the silences are deafening, and the narrative is entrusted entirely to the power of the image. In this, Kitano reveals himself not only as a director, but as a painter and choreographer. Every frame is a canvas composed with a chromatic precision that evokes ukiyo-e painting but transfigures it into an almost abstract modernity. The collaboration with fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto is fundamental: the costumes of the two wandering lovers are not mere clothes, but shimmering canvases that reflect the changing of the seasons and their own progressive fading from the world. They are brightly colored ghosts traversing a natural, magnificent Japan, whose beauty makes their pain all the more acute. It is an aesthetic operation that might recall the dreamlike Kurosawa of Dreams, but while Kurosawa used color to explore folklore and the unconscious, Kitano uses it to sculpt the absolute of a sentiment that consumes everything.

The journey of Matsumoto and Sawako is punctuated by the cycle of nature, a classic of Japanese sensibility that here takes on an inexorable quality. Spring and its cherry blossoms (sakura), a symbol of ephemeral beauty and a beginning that already contains its end; the lush green of summer; the autumn of the momiji, maple leaves as red as blood and as the cord that binds them; and finally winter, the blinding white of the snow that covers and nullifies everything, the stage for the final act. This passage of time brings not evolution, but only withering. It is the perfect embodiment of the concept of mono no aware, that poignant melancholy for the transience of things, but stripped of all sentimentality and taken to its most extreme conclusion. In "Dolls", beauty is inseparable from decay; love is inseparable from death.

The two parallel stories function as variations on the main theme, creating a polyphonic architecture of heartbreaking coherence. The old yakuza, returning to the park where decades earlier he had abandoned his girlfriend to chase success, desperately tries to rewind the tape of time. His story is an elegy on memory, on the phantasmal power of the past that haunts the present. The encounter with the woman, now old and forgetful, who still waits for him every Saturday with the bento box she prepared for him, has a poetic cruelty that chills the blood. Likewise, the young fan of pop idol Haruna voluntarily blinds himself to be able to meet her after an accident has disfigured her, seeking to crystallize her perfect image and join her in a world of shared darkness. In both cases, love is an act of denying reality, an obstinate fidelity to an image that exists only in the mind of the one who loves. It is a solipsistic and, ultimately, lethal love.

Upon its release, some critics accused Kitano of vacuous formalism, of sacrificing substance to an overly aestheticized style. This is an accusation that completely misses the point. In "Dolls", the style is the substance. The artifice does not hide a void but expresses a fundamental incapacity: the impossibility of verbal language to communicate a pain so absolute. The almost theatrical rigidity of the performances, the fixed shots, the obsessive symmetry of the compositions—everything contributes to creating a sense of existential imprisonment. The characters are figures trapped within a painting, not unlike the tragic and beautiful heroines of the Pre-Raphaelites, like Millais’s Ophelia, suspended in an instant of sublime ruin. This is a cinema that does not want to be realistic, but archetypal.

Tying these shards of despair together is, as always in Kitano’s cinema, the score by Joe Hisaishi. His music is not a simple commentary but the film's narrative soul, the emotional voice of characters who have lost the power of speech. The main theme, melancholic and cyclical, accompanies the pilgrimage of the bound beggars, transforming their journey into a funeral dance, a procession toward an inevitable destiny. The synesthesia between Hisaishi's music and Kitano's images here reaches a level of almost transcendent symbiosis, creating an immersive experience that bypasses the intellect to strike the viewer's nervous system directly.

"Dolls" is a demanding, at times difficult, work that rejects any easy catharsis. This is not a film to be "understood," but to be contemplated, as one contemplates an art installation or listens to a piece of chamber music. It is Takeshi Kitano's meditation on love as the supreme form of devotion and, at the same time, of self-annihilation. A sentiment that, when taken to its extreme consequences, does not liberate but chains, does not create but destroys, leaving behind only the still and terrible beauty of a work of art forged in pain. And in the final silence, covered by snow, resonates the awareness that certain bonds, like the red cord, can only be broken by ceasing to exist.