The strange opposition of squalor and beauty in Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-Don

Akira Kurosawa's 1970 movie, Dodes'ka-Den is strange and strangely captivating in almost every respect. It's a movie about the plight and the sufferings of several people and families living in squalor in a small community - much like what today we might call a tent city - on the outskirts of a major city (presumably Tokyo) that we never see in the film. There's a lot of suffering in this movie: sexual abuse, serious alcoholism, promiscuity, mental illness. And though it's by no means a plot-driven movie, a # of the story lines come to sorrowful or tragic conclusions. That said, the movie doesn't have the ponderous and misanthropic feeling of Kurosawa's earlier "class," The Lower Depths, which I consider the most unwatchable classic film of all time. AK intentional and almost perversely contrasts the misery of the lives of the characters with settings of extreme beauty; the rice-paper walls of all the dwellings are beautifully colored, there are many scenes with striking lighting effects, the costumes are bright and witty, and even the uptempo theme music (which evokes for me each time a passage in the Dylan song I Want You) is in jarring contrast with the lives on display. Throughout, a group of women gather at what appears to be the only water source, where they scrub pots and do laundry and gossip - kind of like a Greek chorus. This was AK's first film in color, and he seems to revel in this new (for him) cinematic tool - like a blind man who can see for the first time. Whether his use of color makes any sense in this movie is an open question, but he does manage to attain some heartbreaking moments and well as scenes of riotous beauty amid lives of squalor. The major shortcoming in the film, however, is its complete indifference to the source of this poverty and despair, much less to any remedy. What brought these poor people to this slum? What can the city or the nation do to help them and others? It seems, in this film, that the poverty and squalor are just a given and it's up to the residents, or victims one might say, to make their lives better somehow. As to the odd title, as far as I can see it has no meaning but is the sound - perhaps the Japanese equivalent of "choo choo"? - that a young man, with significant mental illness, makes as he walks through the settlement pretending to be a train conductor (he imagines he's driving one of those single-car electric trains familiar to all viewers of early Japanese cinema).