Red Beard | First Impressions

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

Kurosawa saw RED BEARD (1965) as a turning point in his filmmaking, acknowledging that his subsequent films would be different. The film shows no traces of all the experiments with sound, editing, portable cameras or narration that younger filmmakers from all over the world were engaging with at the time. It’s classic, humanist cinema in the best sense. Structurally it’s almost Dr. Kildare -ish: a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) learns wisdom from a gruff wiser one (Toshiro Mifune) who gently guides him through whatever ethical or medical problems present themselves. A comparison to MARCUS WELBY MD would also not be inappropriate, given the episodic structure of the Kurosawa film. But these are only surface comparisons.

The episodes in RED BEARD are much grittier, harsher: A young mad woman tells stories of sexual abuse as she kills men with her hairpin (Is this where Almodóvar got his opening for MATADOR?) The second story is of a woman who rejected her husband for his younger clerk and married off their daughter to him so she could continue her relationship with him. When the clerk asked his now wife to ask her father for money after he’d stolen his wife and his daughter, she stabbed him. The third story starts with a body found after a mudslide. A man reveals it’s his wife and tells of an impossible love – she’d been bonded for ten years to another — that led her to commit suicide. We see also a young girl captured into sexual slavery at the age of 12; of a young boy who causes his whole family to attempt suicide after he’s caught stealing food. ‘ Poverty’s a political problem they say. But what has politics ever done for the poor?’ asks Red Beard.

The story is the young Doctor’s. He’s been educated in Western medicine and expected to work for the Shogun but circumstances and politics force him into this clinic for the poor, who he initially sees as smelly and inhuman. The change and journey are his. Red Beard’s guidance and his own experience lead him to understand fragility, empathy, compassion, kindness. In his marvellous review of the film, David Denby said that it should be required viewing for all doctors.

RED BEARD is 185 minutes with an intermission half-way through at 1h47. It took two-years to make and would be Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Mifune. The film is set in the 19th century and it views a bit like the equivalent of reading a 19^th-century novel, with sweep, detail, and a moral centre. It has a touch of soap which makes the viewing compulsive but cut through with the style of telling and the grit of the tales themselves. The mise-en-scene is as precise, economical and evocative as good writing. And it’s a film that is always conscious of the viewer: Mifune’s fight scene outside the brothel being the most blatant example. It’s a film that can seem old-fashioned but which I prefer to call classic. I loved it.

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