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★★★
Directed by: #YalanHu
Starring: #TimothyJCox, #DevinCraig, #WayneDeBary, #JeffreyMandel
Being able to deliver an original and gripping story in less than 10 minutes is a hard thing to accomplish. Time just isn’t on your side. Yalan Hu’s film Doll It Up attempted to achieve that feat but whether or not that that attempt was successful is another thing.
The plot for Doll It Up focuses around Gunther and his ‘wife’, Nat, who also happens to be an inanimate sex doll. The problem is this: Gunther’s wife is now too boring and old, she keeps deflating! So Gunther decides to buy himself a newer doll of a wife, and Nat isn’t too happy with being replaced.
There isn’t much dialogue in Doll It Up, most of the conversations are between Gunther and his ex wife or his new girlfriend and neither of those women are able to actually talk. There is the occasional conversation between actual living human beings, but even those conversations don’t hold much importance. The actions and events within the film is what gets the plot moving.
Timothy J. Cox is the most prominent performer, playing the character of Gunther. Cox is able to pull-off an amazing version of a very peculiar guy... the overly eager smiles, the creepy moustache and his ability to genuinely have a conversation with a sex doll is pretty impressive.
Because Doll It Up is only 6 minutes long, there isn’t much room for any meaningful character development, but the character of Gunther is amusing to watch nonetheless.
Nikolay Vassiles and Killer Tracks did a great job of composing the music for Doll It Up. There is only one piece of music used, however it’s lovely and mainly uses the accordion. I find accordions to be really calming and ornate instruments, thus the music they create has a similar feeling of calmness and antiqueness which gives a little bit more finesse to a film which otherwise seems to be set in an average place with average, albeit weird, people. In fact, the music was one of the components that I appreciated most in this production.
Hu’s film could definitely be a commentary on how women are treated as sex dolls that are simply up for buying and disposal at the convenience of seedy men. The treatment of these dolls as if they were actual women, their dressing up by their men and their apparent ability to sometimes move or do things at their own will also suggests that these dolls are simply standing in as metaphors for idealised versions of actual living women. Although, the film aims to be a comedy, therefore I cannot be sure if its intentions were along the lines of my interpretations or not. Perhaps I’m thinking into it too much and it is just meant to be a comedy about a man and his sex dolls. Doll It up and its possibility of looking at relationships between living people and inanimate objects is certainly intriguing and had a lot of potential because of themes such as relationships, objectophilia, female disposability and commodity. However, whilst somewhat entertaining, the plot was too predictable thus disappointing.
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