There was a director named Robert Bresson who refused to call his subjects "actors." He insisted on referring to them as "models." He always hired unknown talent and used them in only one movie before finding a new cast. He rehearsed only to drain the emotion out of his models. To flatten their performances.
Bresson made the following statement:
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
What I felt watching Bresson's A Man Escaped, Au Hasard Balthasar, and Diary of a Country Priest, I felt again watching Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, a quiet little film about people for whom love is an irresistible and fatal noose.
While Bresson's choice to minimize the emotion of his actors comes from a general philosophy of film, Kitano's flows from the story, as love entices, manipulates, and destroys his protagonists.
But while Kitano turns down the volume on drama, he cranks up the color, using vivid reds, sudden season changes and clear visual symbolism as the lovers adopt the outfits worn by puppets in the opening sequence, and as they stroll together bound by a scarlet rope.
Where Bresson did what he did for different reasons, Kitano ends up with a similar effect. Great minds think alike, but for vastly different reasons. The outcomes are worth observing, though.
Actors, stripped of their freedom to act, and placed in very carefully orchestrated shots and stories, seem to carry a paradoxically potent emotional kick. In Dolls, that minimalism communicates a fatalistic view of love, that it takes in who it wills and leaves no life intact.
Which is true, although I try not to think of it in such gloomy terms.
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