Clickety Clack

I've got quite a few foreign films on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. One of those is the Akira Kurosawa film Dodes'ka-den.

The movie is, like Street Scene, a look at the various inhabitants of a poor neighborhood, although in this case, the residents are much, much poorer, basically on the edges of society in conditions much closer to a shantytown or the Brazilian favelas than a tenement. The movie's title comes from an onomatopoetic word for the sound that rail wheels make on a track. A young man lives with his single mother and they both seem to have substantial mental problems. She engages in very loud religious chanting, while the son goes off to "work" as a streetcar conductor, although none of it is real. The son prays for his mom to be granted intelligence by Buddha; left unmentioned is how the two of them survive.

We are then introduced to other inhabitants of the neighborhood, all of them poor, but some vastly poorer than the others:
One man makes hairbrushes by hand, supporting a wife and several kids, with the wife getting pregnant again. Eventually, the eldest son says he gets bullied by other kids at school saying that Mom is sleeping around and none of the kids are the dad's biological kids.
Two couples appear to be in an open relationship, in that the husbands, who both work menial jobs, come home and may or may not, depending on their moods, go home to the women who are their legal wives.
One kid begs for food, and then goes "home" to his father, who lives in the back of Citroën 2CV; not being able to cook the food properly, the kid eventually gets food poisoning.
Another woman is raising her adolescent niece, who is being pursued by an adolescent sake delivery boy. The woman's husband is an alcoholic. Eventually, the niece gets pregnant, leading to violence.
An old guy who worked as a silversmith is the sort of wise old man of the neighborhood, letting a thief take his cash when the thief inadvertently tries to steal his tools.

Eventually, the stories get resolved, more or less, although the movie runs at a slow pace and it takes a while for those stories to resolve.

Alicia Malone presented the movie as part of TCM's Imports, and mentioned in her outro that Dodes'ka-den is a movie that divides critics. It was a box-office failure in Kurosawa's native Japan, while some latter-day critics give it high praise. I tend towards the somewhat negative side. For me, that's largely because of the film's structure. If it had been written as a traditional anthology, with each story getting its own segment, I think it would work a lot better. But it's more like one of those ensemble cast movies, except that the stories don't work so well together.

But because of the decidedly mixed reaction, Dodes'ka-den is one you'll probably want to watch and judge for yourself.