For my last birthday I decided to embark on a new movie watching challenge (similar to ones I’ve done before here and here). This year’s challenge is to do four streams of films, and watch one of each stream in each month. On top of that, we’ll have six “wild card” slots through out the year, to bring it up to 54th movies for my 54th year (I turned 53). You can read more about the plan here. This is post #52.
Spoilers Ahead
Dodes’ka-den (1970)
Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Viewing Stream: Movies Recommended by Friends
Recommending Friend: Josh McDonald
Like a lot of the people I’ve reached out to for movie recommendations, Josh is someone I connected with over filmmaking–he was studying film at the same time as me back at college. He says that it’s been about twenty years since he’s seen Dodes’ka-den, and that he thinks what made it stay with him all this time is how it shows us glimpses of beauty and dignity amongst the squalor of desperate lives.
What it is about: The stories of numerous people all living in the same Japanese slum overlapped intersect. A young woman is sexually abused by her uncle while her aunt is in hospital. A beggar man fantasises with his son about the dream house they will one day own, but the food poisoning they both suffer threatens any hopes that they have. The wives of two drunken men trade them back and forth, seemingly without them being aware of it. An unfaithful wife returns to her devastated husband in an effort to win him back. A man with numerous physical tics and disabilities faces off with his work colleagues when they criticise his selfish and unpleasant wife. A man who raises the numerous children of his serially-cheating wife goes out of his way to make them feel like they are all a family together. And a mentally challenged young man who is obsessed with trains wanders through the slum pretending to drive a trolley car.
Starring Yoshitaka Zushi as Rokuchan (the boy obsessed with trains), Tomoko Yamazaki as Katsuko (the teenaged girl abused by her uncle), Tatsuo Matsumura as Kyota Watanaka (Katsuko’s uncle), Imari Tsuji as Otane Watanaka (Katsuko’s aunt), Junzaburô Ban as Shima (the man with the physical tics), Kiyoko Tange as Shima’s wife, Hiroshi Akutagawa as Hei (the broken man whose wife cheated on him), Tomoko Naraoka as Hei’s wife, Noboru Mitani as the Beggar, and Hiroyuki Kawase as the Beggar’s son. There are actually lots more, but this give you an idea.
My Thoughts: As I started Dodes’ka-den, I was not feeling very hopeful. Kurosawa is a master, of course, and High and Low just might be my favorite film from this year’s whole viewing challenge. But Dodes-ka-den, with its confusingly broad range of characters and general lack of a driving plot, was just not an easy nut for me to crack. The fact that it spent so much time at the start with Rokuchan making his way through the slums as if he was driving a trolley car didn’t help–though he is certainly notable and possibly the first (nearly) explicitly autistic character to be put onto film, he is also potentially the least interesting of the movie’s central figures.
But perhaps the greatest advantage that I’ve experienced from undertaking these challenges is just that it’s led me to start so many movies I never would have considered in the past, and even more importantly it’s pushed me to finish so many films that I’d certainly have given up on. Usually that’s led to a much more meaningful of an experience than I would have had if I’d just given up. And that is the case with Dodes’ka-den.
As I stuck the film through, I got to understand the various figures and plot lines that filled the movie’s slum landscape, and to be intrigued by how things progressed. Almost all the stories are painful, and represent some pretty dark characters and situations. But at the same time, there are as Josh says above moments of incredible beauty and dignity. We see bits where characters hang on to hope and refuse to give in to despair. Of course, there are other characters who do give in to despair, and seem unable to claw themselves out of the pit they are in, but this just highlights all the more the small victories and triumphs that are peppered throughout the character’s lives.
All in all, the film seems to be a pretty even picture of life. There are people who are crushed by life, and stay crushed–like Hei, a man broken by his wife’s infidelity, who never speaks a word or shows any sign of emotion, even when his cheating wife is begging him for forgiveness. But there are others who have just as much reason to give up but remain positive–like Ryotaro, who does what he can to encourage the children of his unfaithful wife that they do in fact belong in his family. None of the stories dominate the runtime, and only a couple of them could have been developed into a main lot, but they are all interesting enough to come back to from time to time. And through it all, there is Rokuchan, relentlessly marching forward like a train, symbolising in some way the way that life keeps going in the midst of both the triumphs and the defeats.
There are perhaps two plots that feel like they could be the film’s “main” plot. One of them centres around Katsuko, the teenaged girl who is raped by her uncle in a scene which is one of the most nightmarish things I have ever seen, while remaining completely non-explicit. The other is about the beggar man and his son, and their dreams about the future house they wish to buy, and the ultimate death of the son due to the father’s foolishness and stubbornness. Both stories are pretty powerful, and full of the emotional ambiguity that pervades the whole film.
My favorite sequence, however, is to do with the character Shima, a resident of the slum who presents himself as a respectable businessman, but suffers from a series of extreme physical tics. There is a ten minute or so scene in the middle of the film where he brings his business colleagues over for a drink, only for them all to be treated with incredible disrespect by Shima’s surly wife.
After she’s stepped out, one of the businessmen expresses his outrage at how terribly she has behaved, only for Shima to lose his temper and wrestle the man to the ground, angrily pointing out how faithful and patient his wife has been with him in spite of his many difficulties. There are so many cultural dynamics going on here, in terms of the honour-shame dynamics, the gender roles, and the way the Japanese characters deal with conflict and uncomfortable situations…it is fascinating to watch. For me, this scene alone is worth the price of the whole movie.
Dodes’ka-den took some perseverance to get through, but in the end I did appreciate it a lot. Even without a central story that drives everything along, the movie does an interesting job exposing us to a wide range character with an equally wide range of emotional tones, bringing to life a world full of victory, comedy and tragedy.
Check out the Masterlist here.
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