Camino de la vida

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.

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.

"Dodes'kaden" was released five years after Kurosawa's last movie "Red Beard" but in his epic body of work scale, if only a pure aesthetic level, the film could have as well been made fifteen years later.

What startles first is the absence of Toshiro Mifune (he wouldn't collaborate with Kurosawa again) and Takashi Shimura and all the stacked actors we were familiar with. All new faces: from the gentle husband with nervous mannerisms and his bullying wife to the elderly wise man who helps a burglar and gives a depressed man faith in life, from the father of five children who rumor says aren't his own to the Greek chorus of women doing laundry and gossiping about the mysteriously catatonic but oddly handsome artist, from the lively prostitutes to the drunkards who swap wives and philosophical comments on life... so many hidden depths revealing no less hidden depths about human nature.

The second shock is the departure from the black-and-white, Kurosawa was a painter deep inside so he doesn't take colors for granted and uses them to paint a rich palette of characters living in Japanese suburban slums, that and a certain personal vision combined with their own visions at times in pure expressionist tradition. It's surprising how we're drawn into these people by inhabiting their own world, starting with the 'local idiot' who spends the whole film mimicking both a trolley and a conductor, using the Japanese clickety-sound of "Dodes'kaden".

Once again, the line between lunatic is genius is thin: we get it that the boy is challenged but there's an interesting shift between the opening sequence showing his drawings of trolleys, all in rich and bright colors so typical of childhood, but relatively motionless. Once the kid starts to embrace his own poetry and gets his "trolley" ready, with a body language that evokes both Chaplin (for the gentleness) and Keaton (for the precision), the camera moves, faster and faster, we're taken to his ride and the film starts to drain the energy that will come at hand to understand the other players.

Yes, it's childish, weird and rudimentary but we're taken within that creative weirdness as if cinema was an art that called for such daringness and maybe Kurosawa is preparing us to something unusual like Bergman did with his "Persona". And like Bergman's film, the film opens with a mother-and-son moment, a prayer so "mechanical" that suggests the birth of cinema as an expresion that couldn't just rely on meditative and contemplative format but on sound and words. By the way, the first time I saw the film, I was immediately caught by that trolley Candide and going to the kitchen to get my dinner, I was repeating "dodes'kaden", that was almost 9 years ago but it was one of the two images that stuck to my mind.

The other image was pretty horrifying, I remembered a man and his kid with horrible greenish faces and a sort of nightmarish psychedelic imagery, the flipside of the uplifting and joyful spirit of our trolley friend. The father spends time dreaming with his kid about the house they'll built, he's a poet, looks like one, his vision of the big house is shown like some sort of imagery with a Hollywood score that kind of sets he distance with the Americanized version of poverty despite his Chaplinian roots, what awaits the kid is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film, that and the father whose traits gets maligned by gross lighting and outrageous make-up of color if he went maybe too far into his own imagery. When he got too close, I covered my eyes.

So the parallel between the poet father and the trolley kid is interesting, both try to drives themselves away from misery, one went too far he alienated himself (looked even like an alien) and one drove in a circular way getting back to the starting point, ironically preventing himself from delusion and giving a meaning to his life even within the realm of meaninglessness. Maybe there's the idea that in places where things don't move and are meaninglessness, only dreams can allow you to move as if in motion lied the meaning. The film starts with the trolley guy being trapped by many corridors and rectangular frames before finding his "freedom" outside. The kid and his father lived outside but that lack of commitment to a local emphasized their dream so much that it destroyed them.

"Dodes'kaden" is an assemblage of little slices of life that seem rather circular and motionless but together they create a whole of themselves where we feel like life is an eternal struggle between reality and the imagination. The kids' drawings are the convergence between both, how a simple trolley can look so colorful and motionless but so existent when we follow it through the kid's mime, that's the merit of the the local idiot who like the titular "Idiot" in 1951, shines a light on "normal" people. It's possibly because of Kurosawa's own sense of exaggeration that he could allow humanism implode from his portrayal of men whose life didn't go anywhere, apart from forging a sense of reality that could be compatible with their dreams.

It's just as if Kurosawa shows both the merit and the limit of escapism as if he was himself aware of the chances he was taking by making this film, whose failure lead to a suicide attempt, so you better believe the filmmaker who had proved the world so much had still to prove to himself. Perfectionist as always and humanistic, that goes without saying, so the film might disorient some new or old fans, cast-wise and style-wise, but if not his best, it's certainly his richest and deepest film.

And here ends my 1600th IMDb review.

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.

If there was anything Akira Kurosawa did wrong in making Dodes'ka-den, it was making it with the partnership he formed with the "four knights" (the other three being Kobayaski, Ichikawa, and Konishita). They wanted a big blockbuster hit to kick off their partnership, and instead Kurosawa, arguably the head cheese of the group, delivered an abstract, humanist art film with characters living in a decimated slum that had many of its characters face dark tragedies. Had he made it on a more independent basis or went to another studio who knows, but it was because of this, among some other financial and creative woes, that also contributed to his suicide attempt in 1971. And yet, at the end of the day, as an artist Kurosawa didn't stop delivering what he's infamous for with his dramas: the strengths of the human spirit in the face of adversity. That its backdrop is a little more unusual than most shouldn't be ignored, but it's not at all a fault of Kurosawa's.

The material in Dodes'ka-den is absorbing, but not in ways that one usually finds from the director, and mostly because it is driven by character instead of plot. There's things that happen to these people, and Kurosawa's challenge here is to interweave them into a cohesive whole. The character who starts off in the picture, oddly enough (though thankfully as there's not much room for him to grow), is Rokkuchan, a brain damaged man-child who goes around all day making train sounds (the 'clickety-clack' of the title), only sometimes stopping to pray for his mother. But then we branch off: there's the father and son, the latter who scrounges restaurants for food and the former who goes on and on with site-specific descriptions of his dream house; an older man has the look of death to him, and we learn later on he's lost a lot more than he'll tell most people, including a woman who has a past with him; a shy, quiet woman who works in servitude to her adoptive father (or uncle, I'm not sure), who rapes her; and a meek guy in a suit who has a constant facial tick and a big mean wife- to those who are social around.

There are also little markers of people around these characters, like two drunks who keep stumbling around every night, like clockwork, putting big demands on their spouses, sometimes (unintentionally) swapping them! And there's the kind sake salesman on the bike who has a sweet but strange connection with the shy quiet woman. And of course there's a group of gossiping ladies who squat around a watering hole in the middle of the slum, not having anything too nice to say about anyone unless it's about something erotic with a guy. First to note with all of this is how Kurosawa sets the picture; it's a little post-apocalyptic, looking not of any particular time or place (that is until in a couple of shots we see modern cars and streets). It's a marginalized society, but the concerns of these people are, however in tragic scope, meant to be deconstructed through dramatic force. Like Bergman, Kurosawa is out to dissect the shattered emotions of people, with one scene in particular when the deathly-looking man who has hollow, sorrowful eyes, sits ripping cloth in silence as a woman goes along with it.

Sometimes there's charm, and even some laughs, to be had with these people. I even enjoyed, maybe ironically, the little moments with Rokkuchan (specifically with Kurosawa's cameo as a painter in the street), or the awkward silences with the man with the facial tics. But while Kurosawa allows his actors some room to improvise, his camera movements still remain as they've always been- patient but alert, with wide compositions and claustrophobic shots, painterly visions and faces sometimes with the stylization of a silent drama meant as a weeper. Amid these sometimes bizarre and touching stories, with some of them (i.e. the father and son in the car) especially sad, Kurosawa lights his film and designs the color scheme as his first one in Eastmancolor like it's one of his paintings. Lush, sprawling, spilling at times over the seams but always with some control, this place is not necessarily "lighter"; it's like the abstract has come full-throttle into the scene, where things look vibrant but are much darker underneath. It's a brilliant, tricky double-edged sword that allows for the dream-like intonations with such heavy duty drama.

With a sweet 'movie' score Toru Takemitsu (also responsible for Ran), and some excellent performances from the actors, and a few indelible scenes in a whole fantastic career, Dodes'ka-den is in its own way a minor work from the director, but nonetheless near perfect on its own terms, which as with many Kurosawa dramas like Ikiru and Red Beard holds hard truths on the human condition without too much sentimentality.