Dodes'ka-den

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.

"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.

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.

In 1970, after a five year absence, Kurosawa made what would be his first film in color. Dodes' Ka-Den is a film that centers around many intertwining stories that go on in a small Tokyo slum.

The title comes from the sound a mentally retarded boy makes as he imagines he is operating a train. We slowly get to know more of the people in the small community, the two drunks who trade wives because they are not happy with the ones they have. The old man who is the center of the town who helps out a burglar that tries to rob him. The very poor father and son that cannot ever afford a house, so they imagine one up of their own. By the end of the film, the stories all come full circle, some turn out happy, others sad.

Since this was Kurosawa's first color film you can see that he uses it to his advantage and it shows. Maybe too much. This movie goes in many different directions and it's hard to settle down and get into it. But don't get me wrong, Dodes' Ka-Den may not be Kurosawa's best, but coming from the greatest director of all time, it's much better than 99% of today's films.