Tag Archives: The Lower Depths

DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970).

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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

THE LOWER DEPTHS (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

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Kurosawa followed is adaptation of Macbeth, THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), in which he deployed the basic premise and some of the structure but none of the dialogue, with yet another adaptation of a classic author, this time Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS (1967), which he follows quite closely. The former ingeniously deploys the theatrical within the cinematic, the latter balances at the other extreme. The film is basically shot in one set, sometimes in very long takes, the dialogue is a fundamental vehicle of meaning, and yet each framing and reframing is precise and expressive.

Beginning:

I loved THRONE OF BLOOD; THE LOWER DEPTHS  is a film I admire and can’t fault but also don’t like. It’s quite a grim premise, which begins with a marvellous shot of workers emptying their garbage bins down the side of the cliff which lands on the rooftops of the down and out dwellers of the lower depths as they’re eating. We’re introduced to a landlord (Nakamura Gangiro II), his wife (Isuzu Yamada), his wife’s sister (Kyoko Kagawa), a thief (Toshiro Mifune), a prostitute, a gambler, an actor on his uppers, a tinker and his dying wife, an ex-samurai. We’re shown how relations of power are merely reproduced no matter at what level. The landlady’s sister is treated like a slave by her own kin. The thief has been having an affair with the landlady but has fallen in love with the sister. The cooper only appreciates his wife after she’s dead. A pilgrim arrives in the middle of all of this to offer wisdom and support. All bear up with their current situation with illusions of who they once were and hopes for change. Near the end the landlord gets killed, the thief and the landlady end up in jail, people leave, there’s a new landlord and new tenants but nothing changes. The film ends on a musical number and a killer last line, which refutes some of the accusations of sentimentality made against the film. The film is also quite funny. The whole ensemble is superb – accounts tell of a rehearsal period between 40-60 days before the film’s shoot — Mifune and Yamada winning prizes.

Mifune’s Entrance:

 

Maxim Gorky’s play was written in 1902, very much of its time, from the beginnings of that revolutionary period in Russia. Stanislavski directed the original Moscow Arts Theatre Production, a big hit, and the film found its way across the world, becoming part of Japan’s theatre repertory from the twenties. By the time Kurosawa made this version there had already been a Japanese adaption from 1921, SOULS ON THE ROAD, (Minoru Murata), a 1946 adaptation in India, NEEDHA NAGAR (Chetan Anand) a 1947 version in China, NIGHT INN (Huang Zuolin); and perhaps most famously, Renoir’s 1936 adaption LES BAS FONDS with Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet.

One of the film’s major themes is that of harsh truths of existence vs the comforting illusions that allow people to live that existence. The issue of truth is an ongoing one in Kurosawa’s work. I suppose the reason I didn’t like the film is firstly, that I’m more with Blanche Dubois regarding illusions, even if it might lead to the madhouse. And it also brings to mind the Butler’s comments to Sullivan in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS: ‘You see, sir, rich people and theorists – who are usually rich people – think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.’ I don’t agree that the subject itself should be shunned but certainly a bourgeois gaze on it, which I take Kurosawa’s version to be, is an uncomfortable one.

Ending of Film:

José Arroyo