Dodeskaden - Menschen im Abseits

Dodes'ka-den is the monotonous sound of the trolley clickety-clacking down the rails; the mindless drone of a brain damaged or retarded "trolley freak" acting out his repetitive fantasy in the Tokyo city dump where he lives with his long-suffering mother; and, a cinematic masterpiece from Kurosawa.

The film doesn't have a traditional plot, it's a snapshot of the lives of a strange ensemble of characters who live in the dump. (In much of the third world today, municipal dumps are inhabited by poor people who scavenge trash to make their living. It wasn't that long ago that the same was true in the US, by the way. In the late 1800's the NYC dump was home to a population of desperate scavengers too.) Kurosawa does his usual brilliant job of creating a full spectrum of characters, except that here most of them are damaged and dysfunctional. Kurosawa is loved for his portrayals of honor, courage, and heroism. Some find it more difficult to appreciate his unblinking examination of loss, failure, wickedness and despair. This film lays bare some of the dark corners of the human heart, and presents the full spectrum of human reality, warts and all - but with an emphasis on the warts.

It's not a dark film nonetheless. These tragic blighted lives are shown with zen clarity and humor. We see a cross-section of human psychology, both good and bad, and the genius of Kurosawa makes it clear that each of us share the feelings and foibles of these Tokyo dregs.

Another demonstration of Kurosawa's genius, his first colour film is a darkly surreal look into the tragic lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, essentially a series of interweaving vignettes depicting several groups of people eking out a perilous existence in a harsh and uncaring post-war shanty town. Swinging from comedy to tragedy and back, this film shows how people deal with the worst kind of life each in their own way, mostly retreating into themselves and living in the fantasy worlds of their own heads, withdrawing emotionally from those around them or drowning themselves in alcohol. Mixing kitchen-sink realism with Kabuki-esque theatrics, Kurosawa toys expertly with the emotions of his audience, drawing tears and laughter with equal deftness. A wonderful, draining experience.

This is a movie about the small scale. What could be more fitting for contemporary Japan?

It's too easy to give Kurosawa his laurels on the strength of the Toshiro Mifune films, his great panoramas of mist and rain, and Fuji, always, shrouded, revealed. Dodesukaden (Dodeska-Den in the US release from Janus) brings you right up into the characters, right into their faces, their homes, their hovels, their dreams. It's billed as Kurosawa's first color film. The composition is phenomenal, really. Each shot, no matter how it moves or how it doesn't, is as wonderfully framed as a painting, as balanced as a beautiful face. The color saturation is complete, and yet they seem to float above the screen rather than clobber you or intrude.

I am astounded by this film. I've never thought of Kurosawa as someone who would know how to handle squalor and the rude life of the bottom of the underclass. I was wrong. There isn't a false step in this picture, from the use of color to the editing to the choice of music and the times it's used. It's as moving a portrait of a community as I'll ever see. Dodesukaden belongs at the top of the canon of Kurosawaa's work, with Ran and The Hidden Fortress next to it.

This one tends to get slighted by a lot of critics and Kurosawa fans, but I thought it was wonderful. It's an episodic multi-character study of Tokyo's poorest, who live in a city literally made from garbage. Though it looks like an A-Bomb just hit, the film has a sort of serene beauty thanks to the glorious use of Technicolor. The title comes from the sound made by the insane young man who drives an imaginary trolley through the slum. All the characters were wonderful and all the stories engrossing, but perhaps the most tragic concerns the man and his young son who live in an abandoned car. When not searching for food, they spend their spare time using their imagination to build their dream house. An emotionally moving and beautiful film.

This is similar to another one of Kurosawa's films 'the Lower Depths' but instead of using theatrical comedy, this film tends towards a more realistic drama to carry out its multi-character case study. Each of the slum residents, who again like in LD are from diverse backgrounds and each of them have a story to tell, and those stories range from heartbreaking to inspirational, though mostly their pasts are not revealed so the viewers had to take a wild guess on how each of them ended up living in the slums.

The plus point of this film against LD is that each character has their own arc so we can solely focus on the person matter without interruption from other characters; in LD everyone tells their stories in the same room which can be quite confusing at times. The minus point is that there seem to be a less clearer picture of the daily, mundane activities by the slum residents to carry on with their lives, aside from the scenes where the little boy begs for leftover foods. Overall, this is a very well-made movie that still put many modern movies of similar theme to shame.