Donzoko (1957) The Lower Depths (Dual-audio Remaster + DVD Extras)

Based on the play by Maxim Gorky, Akira Kurosawa's film is a faithful adaptation, taking liberties only with the change in character names and setting (from imperial Russia to Edo-period Japan). This surprisingly comical tale focuses on the daily tribulations of a group of lower-class people living in a small tenement. Osugi (Isuzu Yamada), the landlady, bickers with Okayo (Kyôko Kagawa), her sister, over the man they both want - Sutekichi (Toshirô Mifune), the thief. Other characters in the close confines include a priest (Bokuzen Hidari), an ex-samurai (Minoru Chiaki), an actor (Kamatari Fujiwara), and a gambler (Koji Mitsui). By setting the film in one room and a small adjoining courtyard, Kurosawa emphasizes both its claustrophobic premise and theatrical origins. Featuring an excellent ensemble cast, Kurosawa's tragicomic film is especially notable for Mifune's remarkable performance as the edgy yet sensitive Sutekichi.

With audio commentary by Donald Richie. Also included is the DVD extra, documentary It Is Wonderful To Create: The Lower Depths.


Akira Kurosawa is no stranger to stage adaptations and his intense version of The Lower Depths is faithful to the restrictions of the play. In this Japanese re-thinking we never leave the flophouse, which has become some shacks at the bottom of a literal pit. The inhabitants still describe it as a hell, and the only outsiders we see (until the police arrive late in the story) are two monks who use the pit as a garbage dump. Kurosawa's camera angle makes it look as if our characters all live at the bottom of the horrible trash hill at the end of Buñuel's Los Olvidados.


Despite the obvious stardom of Toshiro Mifune, there are no favored characters here and Kurosawa sticks to a strict ensemble format. His camera angles are oppressively limited - several views on a square sleeping room, with a few angles outside when the action can't be contained indoors. Things stay wide and static except for the occasional telephoto pan with a moving character.


Fans seem to prefer Kurosawa's more fanciful and flamboyant features. They have something of a point, as Kurosawa purposely limits our ability to identify with any of the characters. The love triangle does without an unwelcome beau for the Natacha character, but the aftermath of the killing is much more deterministic and downbeat. The concluding suicide in this one is reported from offscreen and brings the picture to an abrupt and nihilistic end. Gorky's play is famous and well-regarded, but one can imagine it inspiring a thousand Barton Finks, all writing meaningful but torturous dramas.


One thing Kurosawa doesn't try to do is place the story in Russia! Instead he chooses the distant past of the "Edo Period." Since the characters live in primitive isolation, little has to change. Toshiro Mifune is fine as the thief Sutekichi, although we naturally expect to see more of him. Isuzu Yamada as the cruel sister Osugi and Kyoko Kagawa as the good sister Okayo are veterans of both Kurosawa and Ozu pictures. The most easily recognizable actor is Bokuzen Hidari, the fellow with the impossibly sad grimace from The Seven Samurai. But several other actors from that movie are here as well, including Minoru Chiaki - as a "former samurai" counterpart to the original's Russian Baron.


Kurosawa's film concentrates on Toshiro Mifune, playing a crooked gambler who falls in love with the sister (Kyoko Kagawa) of his cruel landlady (Isuzu Yamada). Herself carrying a torch for Mifune, the landlady exacts a roundabout revenge by killing her own husband and pinning the blame on the gambler. As the landlady descends into madness, those whom she has treated wretchedly laugh at her plight.


Western viewers familiar with Japanese classical theater might find a virtuoso nod in that direction in the scene where the actor takes the tinker’s ailing wife out for a breath of fresh air. Kurosawa makes this altruistic moment into a magnificent parody of michiyuki—the journey sequence in a Kabuki play. It usually features a handsome man and his lover, often a courtesan, on their way to a rendezvous with death. Here, as befits these lower depths and Kurosawa’s high intents, the old actor leads the way michiyuki style, accompanied by a tottering crone. Their progress down the length of the sordid alley also mimics the hanamichi Kabuki passageway. Through his use of michiyuki and other such classical devices, Kurosawa unobtrusively bridges styles to strengthen his version of modern drama, with its universal social implications.


The actor also leads the way to the film’s perplexing ending. Here, too, a number of cultural specifics need explaining in the West. The bakabayashi returns for a spell of drunken merriment. This chorus, as before, pokes fun at this world and the next as being in favor of the rich. The singers themselves find a kind of saving grace in this shared mockery of their own despair. Even the antisocial grouch, the tinker, joins in at the last. The scene comes to a sudden halt when news arrives of the actor’s suicide. “It was such a great party. Then he had to go and ruin everything” - or so the gambler says.


This being a Kurosawa film, the burden of compassion is transferred to us. When the lights come up, the theatricality this film is famous for, recedes along with its comic texture. But it is those occasional threads of comic sensibility that underscore the poignancy of this entire film. We are awakened to somber reality, to the pathos of the downtrodden. The Lower Depths, along with Ran, may be Kurosawa’s two darkest films, the most unremittingly truthful in their look at “man’s inhumanity to man.”




Thanks to CerealRipper for the DVD9.