Dodes'ka-den Directed by Akira Kurosawa Starring Yoshitaka Zushi A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow "King of the Hill" season premiere; new sitcom "Costello": No Elvis Now Showing New video releases for Sept. 15 Y E S T E R D A Y Strangeness in the night By Joyce Millman What's a nice boy like Conan O'Brien doing in a place like late night TV? (09/14/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Rounders Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Some fine actors are dealt a bad hand (09/11/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Latin American Gothic: Roman Polanski's overwrought "Death and the Maiden" (09/8/98) Next Stop, Hollywood By Charles Taylor Hollywood's glossy good-time gal movies put indie-hit "Next Stop, Wonderland" to shame (09/03/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "Haut/bas/fragile": The ecstasy of everyday Parisian life (09/01/98) Monicagate: The movie By Tim Cavanaugh Hollywood's hottest script doctor makes a house call -- to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (08/31/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]___ _____. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . k u r o s a w a _________________________________________I N_.T H E_.S H A D O W S A LITTLE-KNOWN GEM FROM THE LATE JAPANESE FILMMAKER EXPLORES THE POIGNANT INNER WORLD OF A SHANTYTOWN. "From the moment production begins to the moment it ends, there is no telling what will happen." That admission of chance wasn't what we expected of Akira Kurosawa, who died on Sept. 6 at 88 -- think of the siege sequence in "Seven Samurai" or the majestic battle scenes in "Ran" (made when Kurosawa was in his mid-70s) and try to imagine the meticulousness that went into their planning, staging and filming. The title "Ran" means "chaos," and the most visceral moments of Kurosawa's version of "King Lear" do make us feel as if we're stranded in hell. But Kurosawa pulls off the spectacle with a flabbergasting precision. What, you wonder, would have happened if one extra had missed his cue, if one horse had reared up when it shouldn't have? Looking at these scenes now, I envision Kurosawa overseeing the set from a great height, behind his ever-present dark glasses, cowing any accident waiting to happen through sheer, cussed confidence. Even what may be Kurosawa's least characteristic film, "Dodes'ka-den" (1970), demonstrates formidable control. In some ways, planning this picture must have been even harder than planning his epic battles. Those films move in rhythm to an overarching dramatic thrust. "Dodes'ka-den" is a picaresque that required the director to orchestrate its separate vignettes into a cohesive whole. Cutting from one character to another (characters whose paths do not necessarily intersect), Kurosawa prefigures the multicharacter method Robert Altman used in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Nashville" and other films (although without Altman's penchant for improvisation). Set in a squatter's shantytown, "Dodes'ka-den" draws us in with its lyricism and playfulness, qualities that -- though this is one of Kurosawa's greatest works -- may be the reason it's all but forgotten. You could mistake the film for nothing more than a colorful diversion, but given the emotional state Kurosawa was in when he made it, its benevolence seems not merely humane but extraordinarily brave. "Dodes'ka-den" is the work of a man who was struggling, in his life and career, to accept that he could never know what might happen next. According to Audie Bock's preface for Kurosawa's "Something Like an Autobiography," the middle-aged Kurosawa's very successful career took an abrupt downturn after he agreed and then declined to direct the Japanese segments of the war extravaganza "Tora! Tora! Tora!" when it became clear he would not have creative control. Accused of perfectionism, he was only able to begin "Dodes'ka-den" when three other directors agreed to produce it with him. The film was his first commercial failure. With next to no commercial prospects and suffering from a painful and undiagnosed gall bladder condition, Kurosawa attempted to kill himself in 1971. The Japanese film industry was no longer able to finance his expensive projects, so Kurosawa had to turn to the Soviet Union's Mosfilm to finance his next picture, "Dersu Uzala" (1976), and longtime admirers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to broker a worldwide distribution deal for 1980's "Kagemusha." The title "Dodes'ka-den" is a phonetic imitation of a trolley car -- something like the English word "clickety-clack" -- made by the first character we meet in the film, a simple-minded young fantasist (the diminutive Yoshitaka Zushi) who spends his days pretending to drive a trolley through the rubbish heaps surrounding a shantytown. "Dodes'ka-den" follows his journey, spliced together with the stories of the down-and-outers who make up the town, and ends in the evening when he brings his imaginary trolley car back to its point of embarkation. There are broadly comic episodes -- like the two working men whose wives periodically switch husbands when they become tired of their own coming home drunk. Others have a gentle tone of poetic, almost Chaplinesque melancholy -- like the beggar (Noburu Mitani) humored by his practical young son (Hiroyuki Kawase) as he spins fantasies of the house they will build together, or the man (Shinsuke Minami) who lovingly reassures his wife's gaggle of illegitimate children that he's their real father. The story line involving a young girl (Tomoko Yamazaki) worked to exhaustion by a drunkard uncle (Tatsuo Matsumura) who leaves her pregnant and despairing is like a D.W. Griffith melodrama redone by an Italian neo-realist. Kurosawa regards them all with a paternal affection that's never condescending, even when his characters are silly or spiteful. In some scenes, the director's sad, bemused tolerance is passed on to the characters. When the town's wise elder (Masahiko Kamatani) awakens in the middle of the night to find a thief (Sanji Kojima) stealing his tool box, he gently guides the intruder to where the money is and tells him to come back if he finds himself in need. In another scene, a struggling businessman (Junzaburo Ban) fiercely guards the dignity of the hostile wife (Kiyoko Tange) who has always stood by him, defending her against a colleague's disparaging remarks. Kurosawa's townspeople often behave foolishly, but they're never fools. "Dodes'ka-den" is somewhat reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica's "Miracle in Milan," a gentle comic fantasy about a ramshackle community of the poor in which the goodness of the characters is ultimately rewarded. In De Sica's finale, they climb upon the brooms of the city's street sweepers and are borne up to Heaven. "Dodes'ka-den" doesn't have the optimism of "Miracle in Milan," but the film does approach De Sica's surging humanism, which sweeps away the barriers between us and the people on-screen. "Dodes'ka-den" may seem especially poignant because we expect happy endings from so fanciful a film. This was Kurosawa's first movie in color, and the junkyard and ramshackle houses have the same storybook quality as the home of the make-believe conductor, where the rice paper screens are covered with childish drawings of trolleys. Kurosawa reserves his most stylized touches for the story of the beggar and his son; in the scenes when they are at their most desperate, Kurosawa replaces his location set with a brightly colored studio set covered in expressionistic drawings of the setting sun. It's as if the paradise the father constructs in his head had materialized just when he and his boy are too far gone to notice. It's a heartbreaking disjunction. Painful as "Dodes'ka-den" can be, what you take away isn't bleakness or despair, but Kurosawa's embrace of humanity, even in its frailty -- especially in its frailty. The scale is smaller than usual for Kurosawa, but the spirit it reveals is epic. Kurosawa knew we were all on the same trolley. SALON | Sept. 15, 1998 Charles Taylor's "Home Movies" column appears every Tuesday in Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available Sept. 15 ] He Got Game City of Angels A Price Above Rubies Wide Awake Hush Deep Rising