From a story by Shugoro Yamamoto. Dodes ‘Ka-Den (Dodesukaden) is the sound the trolley makes as it travels over the tracks. This movie follows the lives of several inhabitants of a landfill outside of an anonymous Japanese city. Due to the heaps of scrap (metal, earth, concrete, wood, etc.) the little enclave of shacks is physically as well as psychologically cut off from the rest of the world. The inhabitants make forays into the city for supplies/work/scavenging and city dwellers (mostly officials on official errands) make infrequent forays into the enclave.
In this fantasy world of Kurosawa’s, no one is trying to remove the people or improve their lot. They apparently live there by choice. Some live there due to poverty and others because they wish to live outside society. Everyone accepts everyone else on the most basic level. Tempers flare only when someone has had too much to drink or there is some petty disagreement. So in this respect the enclave can be seen as a microcosm of human society.
The inhabitants include: two “buddies” – day laborers who manage to go to work every day and drink away their wages every night and their long-suffering wives (the wives swap husbands for periods of time). There is the old craftsman who is the enclave’s default “mayor.” A dreamer and his son(?) who live in an old car and envision the house they will build someday. The “trolley” boy who operates an imaginary trolley all day thru the landfill and his despairing, oft praying mother. A bunch of women who meet at the one water spigot in the enclave’s center and gossip about all the other enclave members. The hard-working father who unconditionally loves his many children (conceived by other men). The low rung business man married to a domineering and intimidating wife whom he nonetheless loves. The drunk who impregnates his wife’s niece while his wife is in hospital. The niece who works day and night making paper flowers and becomes a zombie as a result. The “ghost” man who is visited by his ex-wife. She repeatedly asks for his forgiveness but is apparently too late. Each of these is an incomplete and unfinished story.
I purposefully have not read reviews of the movie so that I may bring my own personal perspective to this review. My best guess as to what the director was after: to bring the audience into an alternate universe that exists right under our noses: the inner life of the mostly invisible members of society: the homeless, itinerant, illegal, abused and/or addicted, the broken.
In Kurosawa’s alternate universe he masterfully shifts from actual interiors and exteriors to richly painted backdrops and scenes and from natural light to garish artificial colored lights. The inhabitants have desires and dreams but the crushing reality is that they will likely never be realized. So they get by the best they can. This movie has no over-arching theme or message that I can detect, yet it’s beautiful and it’s simple. It makes no judgements, no right or wrong, and it certainly makes the point that the world is made up of a multitude of individuals, each of whom is living his/her story and each has as much a right to do so as anyone else, whether they live inside or outside society. Kurosawa, in his own way, was reflecting on the massive societal upheavals happening throughout the world at the end of the 1960’s, during which living outside society was becoming more common if not more acceptable.
written by jbm 3/2018
the movie is currently streaming on Filmstruck and is available on DVD/Blueray through the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/1083-dodes-ka-den
my thoughts on Kurosawa: https://walkcheerfullyblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/03/vii-directors-i-like/
photo credit: the criterion collection
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