Wonderful Movie

From my favorite movies..

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

DODESKADEN, 1970. Rarely Seen Kurosawa masterpiece viewed at the ENCORE theater, Hollywood - An expressionistic pageant of The Human Comedy that ranks with the best of Kurosawa: Written as Herman Pevner for the Rafu Shimpo, Japanese daily of Los Angeles. (Spring 1975). When Dodes'kaden first came out five years ago it was not too well received, mainly because the Japanese public had come to expect a certain kind of Picture from Master director Akira Kurosawa -- movies with lots of samurai action, a definite story line, and especially, lots of Toshire Mifune, the Japanese equivalent of John Wayne in Kurosawa films.Dodes'kaden, a Fellini-like portrait of a shanty town built from the debris of the Tokyo city dump and populated with the dregs of society with no plot to speak of and no swashbuckling central hero, was just too different and too far-out for most people to accept. Of course it is not unusual for the public to find it difficult to accept a radical change in style from an established director. When Hitchcock came out with "The Birds" a lot of people accused him of sensationalism, senility, and everything else -- now, a dozen years later, Birds is generally recognized as one of his masterpieces."Dodeskaden" was Kurosawa's first color film and, like Fellini and Antonioni before him, when he finally turned to color he went directly to surrealistic expressionism. As Antonioni in "Blowup" he had whole sections of the ground painted in bright colors to suit his vision for certain scenes, and in general the use of color in the film is not only spectacular but ingenious. Now that the real world has -- shall we say, "caught up with" Kurosawa -- vis-à- vis the absurdity of life here in 1975 -- the absurd world of Dodeskaden, 1970 May not seem so far-out after all. As for the title, "Do-des-ka-den" is the sound that a trolley car makes -- something like "clackety- clack" -- in everyday Japanese. The hero, Rokuchan, (Yoshitaka Zushi) is a strange but jolly teenage boy who has a thing about trolleys and makes a daily round of the shantytown in an imaginary trolley car shooing people from the tracks, picking up and discharging invisible passengers, and lustily shouting "do-des- ka-den!" as he goes on his merry way. Taking Rokuchan's trip with him around Hovel City we encounter an incredible variety of people including a couple of grungy alcoholic wife swapping buddies -- a striking comment on today's decadent sex-obsessed suburban mentality. The people in the film are more or less carnival mirror images of the people we see around us every day. The whole film is, in fact, a commentary on the absurd pretentious of an insane society, and the message, if there is one, is perhaps that we would all be a lot better off if we were more accepting of each other's foibles. No matter what the content of his films, Kurosawa's message has always been "Why can't people try to be a little happier?"Particularly outstanding in a cast loaded with talent is Banjun Zaburo, one of the world's cleverest screen comedians, as Mr. Shima, the little man with the epileptic tic and oversized limp -- shades of Chaplin at his best -- and Kiyoko Tange is also memorable as his Amazon-like, no-nonsense domineering wife."Dodeskaden" is an expressionistic pageant of The Human Comedy that ranks with the best of Kurosawa and, if viewed with an open mind, can only make you feel a little better about being a member of our more and more endangered human species.

I first saw this movie as a pre-teen, about the age when kids start to think through their identity. I was greatly affected by the scene of the man and the children who he raises as his own. The eldest boy has been taunted that his mother is a prostitute and none of his siblings have the same biological father (which Kurosawa makes obvious by having children who look nothing like each other). The man still persuades tho boy that he is their father by the only definition that counts. The man is acclaimed to be father by all of the children but one, who still prefers her brother.Each of the vignettes are likewise compelling for their own stories and conclusions.It's a great film, even if it is not the greatest Kurosawa film.

If there was anything Akira Kurosawa did wrong in making Dodes'ka-den, it was making it with the partnership he formed with the "four knights" (the other three being Kobayaski, Ichikawa, and Konishita). They wanted a big blockbuster hit to kick off their partnership, and instead Kurosawa, arguably the head cheese of the group, delivered an abstract, humanist art film with characters living in a decimated slum that had many of its characters face dark tragedies. Had he made it on a more independent basis or went to another studio who knows, but it was because of this, among some other financial and creative woes, that also contributed to his suicide attempt in 1971. And yet, at the end of the day, as an artist Kurosawa didn't stop delivering what he's infamous for with his dramas: the strengths of the human spirit in the face of adversity. That its backdrop is a little more unusual than most shouldn't be ignored, but it's not at all a fault of Kurosawa's.The material in Dodes'ka-den is absorbing, but not in ways that one usually finds from the director, and mostly because it is driven by character instead of plot. There's things that happen to these people, and Kurosawa's challenge here is to interweave them into a cohesive whole. The character who starts off in the picture, oddly enough (though thankfully as there's not much room for him to grow), is Rokkuchan, a brain damaged man-child who goes around all day making train sounds (the 'clickety-clack' of the title), only sometimes stopping to pray for his mother. But then we branch off: there's the father and son, the latter who scrounges restaurants for food and the former who goes on and on with site-specific descriptions of his dream house; an older man has the look of death to him, and we learn later on he's lost a lot more than he'll tell most people, including a woman who has a past with him; a shy, quiet woman who works in servitude to her adoptive father (or uncle, I'm not sure), who rapes her; and a meek guy in a suit who has a constant facial tick and a big mean wife- to those who are social around.There are also little markers of people around these characters, like two drunks who keep stumbling around every night, like clockwork, putting big demands on their spouses, sometimes (unintentionally) swapping them! And there's the kind sake salesman on the bike who has a sweet but strange connection with the shy quiet woman. And of course there's a group of gossiping ladies who squat around a watering hole in the middle of the slum, not having anything too nice to say about anyone unless it's about something erotic with a guy. First to note with all of this is how Kurosawa sets the picture; it's a little post-apocalyptic, looking not of any particular time or place (that is until in a couple of shots we see modern cars and streets). It's a marginalized society, but the concerns of these people are, however in tragic scope, meant to be deconstructed through dramatic force. Like Bergman, Kurosawa is out to dissect the shattered emotions of people, with one scene in particular when the deathly-looking man who has hollow, sorrowful eyes, sits ripping cloth in silence as a woman goes along with it.Sometimes there's charm, and even some laughs, to be had with these people. I even enjoyed, maybe ironically, the little moments with Rokkuchan (specifically with Kurosawa's cameo as a painter in the street), or the awkward silences with the man with the facial tics. But while Kurosawa allows his actors some room to improvise, his camera movements still remain as they've always been- patient but alert, with wide compositions and claustrophobic shots, painterly visions and faces sometimes with the stylization of a silent drama meant as a weeper. Amid these sometimes bizarre and touching stories, with some of them (i.e. the father and son in the car) especially sad, Kurosawa lights his film and designs the color scheme as his first one in Eastmancolor like it's one of his paintings. Lush, sprawling, spilling at times over the seams but always with some control, this place is not necessarily "lighter"; it's like the abstract has come full-throttle into the scene, where things look vibrant but are much darker underneath. It's a brilliant, tricky double-edged sword that allows for the dream-like intonations with such heavy duty drama.With a sweet 'movie' score Toru Takemitsu (also responsible for Ran), and some excellent performances from the actors, and a few indelible scenes in a whole fantastic career, Dodes'ka-den is in its own way a minor work from the director, but nonetheless near perfect on its own terms, which as with many Kurosawa dramas like Ikiru and Red Beard holds hard truths on the human condition without too much sentimentality.

"Dô desu ka den" is the first colored movie of Master Akira Kurosawa, and surprisingly is not about samurais, ronins, warlords or battlefields. It is inside a very poor community in a slum in Tokyo, where the dwellers are homeless drunkards, beggars, tramps, abused women, losers. I do not know the reason why Kurosawa selected this tragic theme and environment to put colors, but indeed they are very sad stories, some of them heart-breaking. I personally like the touching story of the boy and his father that dream with a house of their own and built by them; the story of the retarded boy that believes he pilots a train; the story of the man that raises five children as if they were their own sons and daughters; and the story of the young woman abused by her stepfather. My vote is nine.Title (Brazil): "Dodeskaden – O Caminho da Vida" ("Dodeskaden – The Way of the Life")