DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970). The title is onomatopoeia, the equivalent in English of ‘clackety-clack.’  It begins with a young boy and his mother. She prays as he gets ready to ‘go to work’. The boy has a whole fantasy life. He’s obsessed with trams and imagines himself as a tram inspector. This fantasy life of imagination bookends the film; DODES’KA-DEN ends with the boy returning  home from ‘work’ and a sweeping shot of all the childish drawings of trams that line his home.

Opening Tram:

End Tram

In between, we get a series of vignettes of people living in extreme poverty in a shanty-town outside of Tokyo: A married woman who has children by numerous men but whose husband treats as his own, loving them all. Two couples, colour-coded in red and yellow so you can tell them apart as the drunken men end up sleeping with each others’ wives. A homeless man and his son who dream of building beautiful places but who are forced to beg for food that is often tainted. A woman who returns to her husband after cheating on him but finds he doesn’t forgive. A young girl raed by her uncle while her aunt is seriously ill in hospital. All these stories and more are tied together by women gossiping at a well, a kind of Greek chorus on the action, commenting, distancing, unifying.

The film treads the same ground as THE LOWER DEPTHS but in a contemporary setting. It highlights the extent to which Kurosawa is drawn to this milieu, evident in so many of his films from DRUNKEN ANGEL to RED BEARD. It’s got very beautiful and precise use of colour, though the palette and imagery seems very of its time, a portent of what Kurosawa will achieve later in KAGEMUSHA AND RAN, though the later work now seems timeless. There’s a melding of almost kabuki like imagery with gritty realism and brightly coloured highly stylised fantasy sequences (the homeless man imagining what he’d build) that don’t quite tie in together. The acting is for the most part excellent but off, too-much, in some key characters (the ‘businessman’ with the facial tics and the leg-spasms; the woman at the top of the visual pyramid at the well’.) And though this is the exception, it destroys the delicacy of tone of the whole and makes one realise how much work goes into getting those things precisely right. RED BEARD took two years to make; this was finished in 27 days, and it shows.

Dodes’ka-den was Kurosawa’s first film in five years. Wiki tells me it was his first without Toshiro Mifune since IKIRU in 1952, and his first without composer Masaru Sato since SEVEN SAMURAI in 1954. It was also his first colour film, shot on 35mm in classic 1.37 ratio; and the first time working with Takai Saito as cinematographer, with whom he’d go on to do such extraordinary work with colour and cinematography in KAGEMUSHA and RAN.  It’s an experiment with newish technologies (first time I notice use of the zoom in his work, quite extensive here). It was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film but was such  critical and commercial failure at home that it led Kurosawa to attempt suicide. To me now, it seems a flawed but essential

José Arroyo