The Lower Depths (1957)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Film Review

One of Akira Kurosawa's chief regrets was that he never had the opportunity to direct stage plays.  His hankering for the theatre can be felt in many of his films - including his spectacular Samurai films, some of which have a distinctly theatrical quality to them.  The one Kurosawa film that is closest to a piece of theatre is his often overlooked 1957 masterpiece The Lower Depths (a.k.a. Donzoko), which is adapted from a well-known 1902 play by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.  Not only is Kurosawa faithful to Gorky's text (more so than most other film adaptations), he stages the play as a piece of filmed theatre.  Most of the action takes places within one setting (the squalid tenement building) and the camerawork is far more restrained than on any other Kurosawa film, comprising mostly long static shots and very little in the way of camera motion.  This represented a dramatic departure from the cinematic bravura of Kurosawa's previous great films and critical reaction at the time was predictably negative.  The film was both a critical and commercial flop, although since its first dismal showing it has grown in stature and is now regarded in a comparable light to Kurosawa's other cinematic achievements.

Kurosawa was not the first filmmaker to adapt Gorky's socially conscious play.  The Lower Depths was first re-imagined for cinema by the French film director Jean Renoir as Les Bas-fonds (1936), starring Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet.  Much to its author's chagrin, Renoir departed radically from the tone and substance of the original play and used it as an open endorsement of the Popular Front movement.  Indian director Chetan Anand's 1946 version Neecha Nagar was closer to the spirit of Gorky's play, and this was followed by a Soviet adaptation directed by A. Frolov in 1952.  By the time Kurosawa embarked on his version, The Lower Depths had become a mainstay of modern Japanese theatre and was therefore as well-known to the culturally minded as any other western play.  Kurosawa made the film immediately after completing another stage play adaptation, Throne of Blood (1957), his inspired take on Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Kurosawa had been a keen devotee of Russian literature since his youth and often cited the influences of the great Russian writers on his work.  In 1950, he had directed an adaptation of what he considered to be one of the most important Russian novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Whilst most of Kurosawa's films have strong ensemble casts, only The Lower Depths can be truly described as an ensemble piece.  The main appeal of the film is its amazing repertory of highly talent performers, which consists mainly of Kurosawa regulars, including his main star Toshiro Mifune, here cast in an usually subdued role.  The two most memorable performances are supplied by Bokuzen Hidari and Kamatari Fujiwara, two superb veteran actors whom Kurosawa adored.  Better known for his supporting comic portrayals, Hidari stands out here by virtue of the fact that his character is the only one who is not a laughably miserable wretch.  With a Buddha-like calm he seems to float above the squalor that surrounds him, gently defusing arguments and offering wise words of wisdom to those who will listen.   Despite his likeable persona, Hidari's character instantly arouses our mistrust - like a politician, he is just too smooth and well-meaning to be believed, and just when things hot up he suddenly disappears.  As the tragicomic alcoholic actor who is forever going on about his 'vital organisms', the expressive Fujiwara injects the one note of humanity into the film and is the only character for which the audience is allowed to have any sympathy.  Isuzu Yamada, who was superbly evil as Lady Macbeth in Throne of Blood is delectably venal as the landlord's unfaithful wife and gives a suitably feisty performance.  Suffice it to say that every other member of the cast has his or her own moment and makes a perfectly judged contribution to this marvellous human collage.

Rather than set the play in present day Japan (which might just have been plausible), Kurosawa instead opted to make it a historical piece, setting it in the Edo period of the mid-19th century, a time of widespread social and economic collapse accompanying the disintegration of the Shogunate.  Kurosawa would use the same setting, to devastating effect, in his subsequent great Samurai film, Yojimbo (1961).  Locating the film in the past allowed Kurosawa to make a far more scathing critique of modern Japan than might otherwise have been possible.  It is not hard to see why The Lower Depths appealed to the director, as it deals with a theme that is central to his work: the discrepancy between illusion and reality.  There are strong similarities with Kurosawa's later film Dodes'ka-den, both in its style and approach (and it was another notable flop).

Virtually all of the characters in The Lower Depths have one thing in common: they are in denial of their present sordid reality and live in expectation of a better future, a future which it is obvious they will never see.  The wise pilgrim Kahei sees this but rather than dispel the illusion he encourages it, saying: 'Lies are not always evil, nor is the truth always good.'  (He might just as well have been a politician...)   It is better to live with one's head in the clouds than to be aware that one's feet are stuck in the u-bend of human misery.  The tragedy of the delusion is expressed most powerfully in the final sequence: as the ragged denizens are happily dancing and singing, apparently in celebration of their misfortune and life's injustices, they receive the news that the unfortunate actor has gone out and hanged himself.  They are outraged: how dare he spoil their fun!  Kurosawa's sour commentary on present day Japan immediately hits home with the force of a Samurai spear.  The explosion of western-style consumerism in the mid-1950s had provided a convenient distraction from the harsher realities of life, and Kurosawa understood better than many the social consequences of this for Japan.  In contrast to many of his other films, Kurosawa goes to great lengths to distance the spectator from his characters.  He doesn't want us to identify with them too closely but to see them for what they are: wretches living in a fool's paradise, like pigs luxuriating in their own filth.

Despite the film's dark, almost nihilist tone, there is an abundance of humour which seems to spring naturally from Gorky's play.  Kurosawa often uses humour in his films to underscore the bleakness of the subject matter and here he has ample opportunity to use comedy as a dramatic device.  Every character in the play is inherently comical, so wrapped up is he in his own delusions that it could hardly be otherwise.  But whilst we may laugh at their shortcomings, the grim tragedy of the characters' predicament is never far from sight.  The tinker who neglects his wife whilst she is dying but falls apart once she is gone.  The drunken wreck of an actor who still believes he can make a comeback but ends up killing himself.  The down-at-heel samurai whose claims of noble ancestry are scoffed at by everyone he meets.  Every one of these sad specimens of humanity is an object of ridicule, and yet we know in our hearts that we should pity them, for their suffering is as evident as their absurdity.

Film Synopsis

Japan in the mid-19th century.  A rundown tenement in a slum area is home to a bedraggled hodge-podge of thieves, gamblers and prostitutes, lowlife who have no future and who live on futile dreams.  An old pilgrim Kahei arrives and proves to be a calming influence on the unsettled, often fractious assembly of cheats and misfits.  One of the tenants, a temperamental thief named Sutekichi, has been having an affair with his landlord's wife Osugi, although he has recently switched his attention to her sister, Okayo.  A far kinder person than the double-dealing Osugi, Okayo is liked by the tenants but is constantly bullied and tyrannised by her sister and brother-in-law.  When the landlord Rokubei attempts to beat Okayo into submission, Sutekichi comes to her rescue.  In the ensuing scuffle, the thief kills his landlord and Osugi is quick to denounce him as a murderer...