DODES'KA-DEN - DVD review

After making nearly a film per year from 1941 to 1965, Akira Kurosawa went five years between films. It was not by choice. After "Red Beard" (1965), his final film with the legendary Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa fell victim to the temptation that has claimed so many great directors before and since: the siren call of Hollywood.

Kurosawa worked for two years on the Japanese sequences of "Tora! Tora! Tora!" before being unceremoniously cut loose by Twentieth Century Fox where he apparently didn't fit into the studio's plan to create a complete piece of shit. Faced with a shaky film industry in his homeland, Kurosawa would not return to the director's chair until 197o.

"Dodes'ka-den" (1970) was not just the master's return from a stint in the wilderness, but also his first color film, and Kurosawa certainly didn't shy from the new challenge. Also a painter, he decorated his set in pastel primary colors and psychedelic dioramas that are so dazzling they almost distract from the disappointment of Kurosawa's comeback effort.

"Dodes'ka-den" follows the lives of several of the down-and-out denizens of a slum. The set is intentionally artificial with the buildings crammed together so tightly that virtually everyone could be in frame in a single wide shot. Each of the stories is separate but they intersect periodically, a necessity considering it's impossible to walk more than a few steps without bumping into your neighbor.

The title is an onomatopoeic term for the sound of a train ("Clickety-clack" in English). Rokuchan, a mildly retarded young man, spends his entire day pretending that he is a train conductor, or rather the train itself. He chugs through the garbage heap ruins surrounding the slum, all day long chanting "Dodes'kaden, dodes'kaden." He goes largely unnoticed by virtually everyone except a group of taunting kids who throw rocks at him.

Other stories have more developed arcs. Mr. Shima, whose unique gait is surely funded by Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, deals with a shrewish wife whose honor he defends with passion. A lonely man who has lost his family and his job has also now lost his will to live while just on the other side of town, two permanently soused ne'er do-wells have traded wives though it's nor certain whether they've done it on purpose or not.

There's a touch of humor in a few of those stories but none whatsoever in the two narrative strands that come closest to taking center stage. Young Katsuko lives with a monstrous stepfather who forces her to walk all day long while he drinks himself into a self-pitying stupor. Outsiders even in this group of outsiders, a beggar barely scrounges enough of a living to support himself and his son who is gravely ill. Both stories come to a head at roughly the same time, and force the viewer to re-consider the breezier tones that the film starts with. The only salvation in the film is provided by the kindly Mr. Tanba, a village elder of sorts who always seems to know the right thing to say or do to defuse a situation.

Rokuchan is supposed to represent innocence, and the power of dreams to preserve said innocence but it's this kind of heavy-handedness that ultimately drags down this film. There's never any sense that these characters are real people. They're pieces that Kurosawa pushes across his squalid chess board, each being sacrificed at just the right time to hit a tragic or sentimental note. It's difficult to weave so many threads together in a harmonious pattern, and I felt like Kurosawa was forcing everything to fit together so hard that There's a mechanical sterility here that just doesn't sit well with his earlier films.

Perhaps it was intentional. "Dodes'ka-den" was a major departure for Kurosawa, a clean break both from his on-screen avatar Mifune and from anything resembling naturalism. His use of color is fascinating. Each character occupies his or her own separate and distinct space and has a different color palette, a marvelous achievement on such a cramped set. But everything else feels so hollow and occasionally phony, that it's hard not to view the film as one of Kurosawa's weakest efforts. The fact that it was the first Kurosawa film to be nominated for a Foreign Language Picture Oscar is yet another in a long line of Academy blunders and embarrassments.

VIDEO

The film sis presented in its original 1.33:1 full-screen ratio. Like most recent Criterion full-screen releases, the image is pictureboxed (basically, surrounding by a thin black frame.) The colors are rich and the image quality is very sharp, as we've come to expect from Criterion.

AUDIO

The DVD is presented in Dolby Digital Mono. Optional English subtitles support the Japanese audio.

EXTRAS

The only extra is yet another excerpt from the "Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create" series (36 min.)

The insert booklet features an essay by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince and an interview with Teruyo Nogami, one of Kurosawa's regular assistants.

FILM VALUE

It would be another five years after "Dodes'ka-den" before Kurosawa made his next film. If you ever want to bust out a great piece of trivia knowledge on your buddies, tell them that the only Kurosawa film that won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was the Russian-language, Russian-submitted "Dersu Uzala" (1975). Which, incidentally, is also one of his weaker efforts. Chalk another one up for Oscar.

"Dodes'ka-den" is probably my least favorite of the Kurosawa films I've seen but it's not without its redeeming qualities, particularly in the painter/director's expressive use of color. It's gorgeous to look at, and it's sure as hell better than "Tora! Tora! Tora!"