The 1970 film \u201cDodes\u2019ka-den\u201d has always been a puzzling piece of the Akira Kurosawa canon. Despite its cred \u2013 an Academy Award nomination as Best Foreign-Language Film and the distinction of being the director\u2019s first color film \u2013 audiences did not embrace it during the film’s theatrical release. The film\u2019s commercial failure in Japan compounded a myriad of professional and personal problems that pushed Kurosawa to a suicide attempt. Outside of Japan, it was barely seen on the big screen \u2013 a U.S. release didn\u2019t take place until 1974.
\n<\/p>\n
Viewed today, it is easy to see what went wrong. Kurosawa\u2019s belated journey into color cinematography resulted in an artistic overkill: garish art direction and costuming matched with blatant artificial effects (particularly the use of boldly painted skies) called too much attention to the filmmaking technique. The visual subtlety that made classics out Kurosawa\u2019s work was absent in this sledgehammer approach to cinema.<\/p>\n
Kurosawa\u2019s scattershot approach to his source material, Shugoro Yamamoto\u2019s short story collection \u201cThe Town Without Seasons,\u201d didn\u2019t help. \u201cDodes\u2019ka-den\u201d consists of interconnected tales of strangeness and tragedy involving a community living in crummy shacks within an overwhelming garbage dump. The film has no strong central character \u2013 the closest thing it has to a connecting personality is a demented youth who runs about the garbage dump while believing his driving a trolley car. The youth\u2019s complete divorce from reality mirrors the fate of his neighbors: some are oblivious to their circumstances, others ignore it and, in one case (the most tragic of the stories, involving a deranged homeless man whose child dies from food poisoning), delusion takes over completely. No one in the film tries to better themselves \u2013 the characters exist in a Beckettian nightmare without realizing a better life is possible.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Kurosawa directs his cast in an Acting 101 method that prevents the ability for anyone to create a fully dimensional character. A comic tale of two drunken laborers who swap wives is a weak farce \u2013 the men are vaudeville-worthy inebriates and the wives are too gorgeous and smart, to the point that it is impossible to believe they are wasting their lives with such losers. The more serious episodes, including a teen girl molested by her stepfather and a near-catatonic man whose life was destroyed by his wife\u2019s infidelity, are overplayed to the point that they become caricatures of tragedy. The marriage of a gruff woman and her mild-mannered handicapped husband is steamrolled by giving the woman acute tough guy habits (complete with dangling cigarette and built-in scowl) and trapping the man in a weirdly overstated limp and a too-severe facial tic.<\/p>\n
As a result, \u201cDodes\u2019ka-den\u201d is awash with color and fury but lacking in heart and soul. The ultimate effect is the cinematic equivalent of a neon sign: full of flash and color, but never truly illuminating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The 1970 film \u201cDodes\u2019ka-den\u201d has always been a puzzling piece of the Akira Kurosawa canon. Despite its cred \u2013 an Academy Award nomination as Best Foreign-Language Film and the distinction of being the director\u2019s first color film \u2013 audiences did not embrace it during the film’s theatrical release. The film\u2019s commercial failure in Japan compounded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":54698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1369],"tags":[1534,77,4089,4090],"class_list":["post-54697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-retro-cinema","tag-academy-awards","tag-akira-kurosawa","tag-dodeska-den","tag-japanese-cinema"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54699,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54697\/revisions\/54699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}