Film Review
By the late 1960s, the Japanese film industry was in crisis, facing
threats from two fronts: television and imported films. Akira
Kurosawa was just one of many old guard filmmakers who were now looking
distinctly irrelevant to a modern Japanese audience and consequently
found it hard to continue making films. There was a five year
hiatus between Kurosawa's historical epic
Red
Beard (1965) and his next film,
Dodes'ka-den, and the intervening
time was squandered on two American projects which never came to
fruition. After the aborted
Runaway
Train, Kurosawa was drafted in to direct the Japanese portion of
Tora!
Tora! Tora! (1970), but ended up walking away from the film
after falling out with the production team. On his return to
Japan, Kurosawa teamed up with three other notable Japanese directors -
Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa - to form their
own film company Yonki no Kai. Kurosawa's next feature,
Dodes'ka-den, was the first film to
be made by this fledgling company, and also the one to bankrupt it.
Dodes'ka-den is unlike any
film that Kurosawa had made previously, although thematically it has
much in common with his earlier
The Lower Depths (1957).
Whereas most of Kurosawa's films revolve around a heroic central
character (more often than not played by his favourite actor Toshiro
Mifune),
Dodes'ka-den offers
up an ensemble of pathetic outsiders, all eking out a threadbare
existence on what looks like an urban dumping ground. The subject
matter may be grim (desperately so in some scenes) but Kurosawa tackles
it with an uncharacteristic lightness of touch that compels us to
sympathise with each of the colourful characters he throws our
way. Virtually plotless, the film consists of a series of
unrelated vignettes which were inspired by a collection of short
stories from Shugoro Yamamoto, whose work Kurosawa had already adapted
for
Sanjuro
(1962) and
Red Beard.
Most significantly,
Dodes'ka-den
was the first film that Kurosawa made in colour. The director had
resisted making a colour film for over a decade but when he finally
took the plunge it was with the relish of a little boy learning to
express himself with his first paint set. Kurosawa's approach to
the design of the film is anchored more in expressionism than realism,
the gaudy, over-painted sets showing the world not as an outsider would
see it, looking in on the grim, hopeless lives of the protagonists, but
how the protagonists themselves see it. For those who have only
the barest of necessities to live on, reality is only tolerable if it
is coloured by the imagination and given a fairy tale hue. The
most extreme case of this is the bear-like tramp who lives in a car
with his little son; as their situation worsens the world around them
begins to appear increasingly artificial and ends up as a stage set
with a painted backdrop adorned with a blazing sunset. The worse
things get, the more potent and deranged the fantasy becomes.
When you recall that it took two years for Kurosawa to shoot
Red Beard, it seems incredible that
his next film,
Dodes'ka-den,
was in the can within just four weeks. Dispensing with his usual
gruelling rehearsal schedule and habit of filming only when the weather
was in perfect accord with his plans, Kurosawa gave his cast (made up
of virtually unknown actors) far from freedom than he was used to and
even allowed them to improvise whole scenes. The film may not be
as polished as the director's other work, but it has a vitality and raw
authenticity which makes it every bit as appealing.
Dodes'ka-den contains some of the
most poignant scenes of any Kurosawa film, and it is partly the
spontaneity of the performances and mise-en-scène that make
these so effective and memorable. The image of a backward young
man driving his imaginary tram over an urban wasteland (the film's
title derives from his attempt to imitate the sound of a tram) is one
of the most iconic in Kurosawa's entire oeuvre, a powerful statement of
the importance that dreams play in all our lives.
Even today,
Dodes'ka-den
remains one of Kurosawa's most overlooked and underrated films.
It has few of the qualities that we associate with this great cineaste
- most notably the cinematic bravura of his samurai epics - but it has
the one that is perhaps the most essential, Kurosawa's humanity, his
compassion for his fellow man. When it was first released in
Japan in 1970, the film was a spectacular flop. For Kurosawa,
this was one failure too many and he attempted suicide a short while
afterwards. Miraculously, he survived and within a few years was
engrossed on his next epic venture, the ambitious Soviet-Japanese
co-production
Dersu Uzala (1975). The
director's big comeback was just around the corner.
© James Travers 2014
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Next Akira Kurosawa film:
Dersu Uzala (1975)