Dodes'ka-den (1970)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

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.

Film Synopsis

Roku-chan lives with his mother in a small shack on a rubbish dump.  A retarded young man with no hope of finding work, Roku-chan spends his days driving an imaginary tram around the dump.  His neighbours include the kind old man Mr Tanba, who offers money to a burglar who breaks into his house, and a wife-swapping pair of drunkards, Hatsu and Mazuo.  One young woman resists the amorous attentions of a delivery boy and ends up getting pregnant by her uncle, who flees in a panic when his misdemeanour is revealed.  A bedraggled beggar who lives in a dilapidated car with his young son dreams that one day he will own a grand house in the country...