I'm going through Kurosawa withdrawal.

After Donzoko which I found suffocatingly familiar, and Ran, which has continued to work on me in deep and mysterious ways, I took a break, rented Olivier's Lear (to see how he stacked up to Tatsuya Nakadai's Hidetora)...


The thing you marvel at with Lear is how wrenchingly right-on Shakepeare's take on madness is.  It's those islands of lucidity that make Lear's madness both plausible and poignant.    

After Lear I rented Les Bas-fonds, Renoir's version of Gorky's The Lower Depths, which Kurosawa had no doubt seen, but didn't pay much attention to. Although the two "versions" are so commonly compared nowadays that Criterion released them both in one box, they're nothing alike, and don't bear comparison at all in my book.  To say that one is better would be like saying Raging Bull is better than La Cage Aux Folles.  Nor would you fair much better comparing either to the original.

Personally I found Renoir's movie more watchable, but Kurosawa's more important to watch.  Renoir's is beautifully made eye-candy, but Kurosawa's is art.  And not in the snooty, pretentious sense.  In the heights and depths of human emotion and understanding it unabashedly attempts to reach, and in the quality of human truths it seeks to out.  These are the kinds of things you don't mind suffering for.  And, arguably, you should suffer a bit at depictions of human suffering.  If there's anything in them. 

Not that there wasn't humor in Donzoko, but it was wasn't the kind you laugh at unless you're in the lower depths yourself.

I had a student when I was teaching high school in a little village in Hungary called Püspökladány (I can hardly believe it was eleven years ago now), who was struck by a train his senior year, and lived.  He had been a star pupil, handsome and athletic, chess champ and captain of the soccer team—proud and a little haughty, I thought. Honestly, I never liked the kid.  But that's not the point.

After the accident (which happened after I'd moved to Budapest) he was obviously pretty messed up.  He had all his limbs and everything, but he'd sustained quite a bit of nerve damage, I guess you'd call it.  When I saw him about a year after the accident, he tried to break the ice by making a joke about getting hit by a train, buh-dum-bump.  I must have looked on in horror, because he complained that nobody seemed to get the joke.

I told him, no, no, I got it.  It's just not particularly funny, is all. I mean, jokes about getting hit by trains are only funny to people who've been hit by trains, I think. It's a very particular type of humor.

And that's kind of how you feel watching Donzoko.

Which is what I loved about Renoir's movie, after watching Kurosawa's.  He actually had the gall to give his version of this relentlessly, inescapably depressing tale a happy ending! 


There were actually a lot of gorgeous little touches in Les Bas-fonds.  That aura of inescapable squalor that Kurosawa hammers us with in Donzoko is just nowhere to be found here.  Even the evil landlord (played by Vladimir Sokoloff) is more a pest than a menace, and lives upstairs from his motley troupe of tenants in what amounts to a curiosity shop.

His death at the hands of the same people he's been bilking since God knows when is drawn out and dramatic...


...where the corresponding scene in Kurosawa (I know I'm comparing when I said I wouldn't, but I'm making a point here) is as utterly matter-of-fact as, say, Scorsese's dispatching of DiCaprio in The Departed.  There is no hint of justice in the landlord's death (an important point, as it fulfills by accident what the evil landlord's evil wife had been plotting to do to him all along).  Nor is the scene, as in Renoir, an opportunity to make a statement about solidarity among the wretched.

There are gems in both films, of course.  In Renoir I was enchanted at times by Junie Astor's Natacha...


But more by her presence than her performance, if that makes sense.  She does that look a lot.  What can I say? I like it.

But I find Kurosawa is for me a lot like his favorite writer—when you're watching his films, just like when you're reading a novel by Dostoevsky, you sort of sink into the world they've created, and it clings to you and colors everything you see.  It may be the completeness of their vision, how perfectly they've rendered it.  It may be that the questions they pose through their art are especially enduring, that the way they pose them is itself especially enduring. 

At any rate, next up is Kagemusha.

But before we leave the lower depths, I have a story of my own from them.

I dropped into the Goodwill on Elm this morning a little after ten.  That's when you find the middle-aged immigrant men looking for salvageable appliances in the basement, and the seniors gathering among the mismatched housewares gabbing about their finds.  It's sort of a festive place mid-morning. 

This morning it was even livelier, on account of the rain I think.  Folks were tinkering and chattering and doing their thing.  I was surveying the book section (I found a brand new copy of The Vegan Lunchbox in perfect condition, paid ninety-nine cents for it, turned around and sold it on amazon for nineteen bucks this afternoon). 

They were cranking the Saint-Saëns—the whole atmosphere was almost narcotic. (Could also be something they spray on the clothes donations to kill the lice.)

Suddenly there was a sharp, piercing "don't you EVER do that again" from the elevator.  It was so loud and sudden and sharp and mean and obviously uncalled-for that everyone—everyone—whipped around to see who it was.  I can't over-exaggerate here.  You know that tone of voice that people use that's just dripping with all the spleen in them? This bitch was like something out of 28 Days Later. 

She had a kid in a stroller, and she was screaming at the kid like that.  I didn't hear a peep out of the kid, so it wasn't one of these situations where the exasperated mother is at her wit's end with the kid throwing a tantrum.  I could only imagine how beaten down he must be already, when at the least provocation she's unleashing that torrent of bitterness and hate on him. 

Because that out-of-kilter reaction and that vicious tone was a vocal smack in the face. And everybody in that room knew it didn't end with that.  Anybody who can produce that sound and unleash it on a child has no trouble beating a child when she's in a place where she can do it.

I'm all for disciplining kids, Lord knows.  I don't think physical and verbal abuse is ever an effective method of doing so, however.  Abuse is never about disciplining a child.  It's about undisciplined adults taking their troubles—real and perceived—out on children, who depend on them and can't fight back. And that is cowardly and vile.

But the old folks in the basement weren't standing for it.  They all started yelling at her as the elevator doors closed.

"What's wrong with you?"

"You don't talk to a child like that!"

"What are you, crazy?"

She fired back at them in that same vicious tone: "Don't you EVER tell me what to do!"

"Shut up!" a cranky old man shouted back.

The woman continued to mumble and grumble, bursting out in vicious self-pitying little tirades against her persecutors for the next fifteen minutes.  It was abundantly clear she was nuts.  And you can bet when she got home, she beat that poor kid senseless, blaming him for her public humiliation in the thrift shop basement.

Talk about the lower depths.

Sterilization was not the first word that popped into my head, but I can't deny it wended its way there eventually and seems now to be lodged quite comfortably in my frontal lobe.