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| "Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack" |
Dear Internet,
This is
the fifth Akira Kurosawa film I have gone over for the Backlog, and I will say
it up front that I was unimpressed more or less. I would rather not beat around the bush concerning
what I think about this film. Partially
because I want to get this review over as quickly as possible but mostly
because I would like to save you from having to experience a review as adrift
as this film was. The film suffers
heavily because of this meandering narrative that goes nowhere for two hours.
"Dodes'ka-den"
is set in a landfill. As far as the eye
can see, there is trash and debris thrown about. The houses are built from secondary materials
and anything else the denizens can get a hold of. The film follows around a collection of
individuals as they go about their daily life in the shanty town. There is the homeless bum and his son who
dream of a house to call their own.
There are two couples, who are color coded for the convenience of the
audience that regularly trade spouses.
There is the mentally handicapped child who daily goes out and works an imaginary
tram late into the night. On top of that
are a number of other individuals that make a scattering of the setting. As the film rolls, the audience witnesses a
few mix-matched small stories play out.
All these small plots unwinds, the various characters that make up the world
are displayed in deeper detail.
If you
are looking for a more cohesive story, you are not going to find one here. "Dodes'ka-den" is about nothing in
particular. There is no overarching
unification of the various stories or of the characters to one another very
much. For the most part, all of the
various stories are independent of one another to the point that it feels less
like a feature film and more like a series of short ones edited together. The closest thing that unifies the stories
together, besides the setting, is the collection of unnamed women that seem to
perpetually do their dishes in the communal water source. Yet, that is about the height of their
interaction with any of the various stories.
They act more as narrators to create exposition through the gossip they
pass to one another and inadvertently to the audience.
What
ends up happening with this lack of cohesion between the various stories is a
somewhat haphazard final product. While
each one of the various stories can be taken by itself and examined to see what
it is trying to showcase to the audience, the collection as a whole does not
seem to have any specific direction. Since
there are only a few times that the various stories intermingle, the only thing
that can be argued is that the film as a whole is meant to showcase a certain
level of futility considering the rounding nature of the opening and closing
segments.
The
film opens up and closes with the child that believes he is a tram
conductor. We see him begin his daily routine
with all the various miming to show where his imaginary tram exists. The audience sees his mother, who prays to
Buddha alongside her son. At the end of
the film, we see him return to his home and finish his daily grind. As bookends, these scenes do create some sort
of framing mechanic, but that is about as far as it goes. At first, I thought the film was going to
follow specifically the child and treat him as a main character, but this is not
the case. After only a few minutes with
this character, the film abandons him for all of two or three scenes here and
there until the last scene. When I figured
out that the scope of the film was much larger than one character, I thought
that maybe the film was going to continue to use him as some sort of segue to
the various stories, but that did not seem to be the case. Then I thought that the film would be using
him as a sort of foil for the various characters and highlight their faults and
problems, but that did not seem to be the case.
The film does not use enough juxtaposition to warrant such an
outlook. The film as a whole did not
seem to have a specific direction as to where it was going. If the point was that life is just going in
an endless circle, it is a somewhat depressing point.
There
is one thing that the film does well that I cannot leave out. "Dodes'ka-den" is Akira Kurosawa's
first color film, and he presents a wonderfully vibrant world of color. In the landfill world of the film, any sort
of color quickly attracts the eye to it.
Take the color coded couples. You
can easily tell when one husband is cheating on his wife when he walks into the
wrong colored house. Then there are two
characters that get gravely sick.
Kurosawa has the two painted up with deep hues of green and blue to
highlight their physical maladies. But
the greatest visual display has got to be the tram child's home. The home is made in a simple Japanese style
manner, built of wood and paper.
However, instead of plain white paper being used to line the wooden
doors, a large number of either crayon or water colored drawings are used. Each one of the drawings depicts a tram car. The effect created when the film shows the
interior of the house in the morning is a beautiful stained glass house. The light passes through the drawings and the
house is illuminated by it. Color is one
of few things that the film gets spot on.
You
might find something about "Dodes'ka-den" to like. In fact, there are a number of characters and
stories to like here, but I did not find the film as a whole to be
enjoyable. At times, the quiet scenes added
a dynamic to the behavior of characters, but would also make the film stretch
out a bit too long. For a film that is
about nothing in particular, it takes quite a while to say nothing. It reminds me a bit of Kurosawa's earlier
work, "The Lower Depths."
While both films detail those that rest at the bottom of society, at
least "Lower Depths" had something to say. Albeit it was Russian realism, which means
Russian pessimism, but at least that film carried a bit of suspense to a
central plot. "Dodes'ka-den" is
like a slice of life film without any of the genre's charm. Outside of the tram child, there is not much
worth watching the film for.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Next is "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" for PC,
provided I can get it operational.
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