sweating it
by Douglas Messerli
Akira
Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) Nora inu (Stray Dog) / 1949, USA 1963
A rookie police detective, Murakami (Toshirō
Mifune), has his colt pistol stolen by a pickpocket and a woman accomplice on a
tram, he chasing after the offender the minute he perceives it is missing; the
robber, however, eludes him, and the detective, in a time when guns are rare
commodities, worth hundreds of dollars in the underground market, is horrified
by the event. He expects a severe reprimand and, perhaps, even the loss of his
job. Yet basically, his higher-ups offer sympathy rather than censure, as they
attempt to calm down the excitable young officer.
Mifune’s hot-headed actions, every muscle in his body poised to spring
into action, creates in Murakami a character that is perhaps not so very
different from the criminal himself, as we gradually discover that both, as
Sato characterizes them, are figures après
le guerre (a phrase he can barely utter)—former soldiers who have returned
to a Japan that is not only without meaning, but without jobs, homes, food, and
stability. Both Murakami and his prey have had even their backpacks stolen upon
they trip back to the city; both have had to suffer the horrors of war, only to
be met with the deprivations of post-war Japanese life.
As
Sato makes clear, however, the difference between them is immense, one working
in a system of justice and guilt, the other attempting to justify his criminal
activities by his sense of isolation. Bit by bit, through Sato’s knowledge of
the underground world and small snippets of information provided by their
informants, the duo tightens the noose in their search for Yusa (Isao Kimura),
first through the pickpocket’s woman accomplice, then through a gun-dealer
Honda, and finally, through a woman friend of Yusa's, the showgirl Harumi
(Keiko Awaji)—but not before the criminal robs another woman, this time killing
her with the same weapon that begin in Murakami’s coat pocket, and, ultimately,
almost killing Sato himself.
What doesn’t get said in the film's subtle
narrative, a work which Kurosawa himself underestimated given the technical
bravura of his film—a work which the director repeatedly compared to the
filmmaking of Jules Dassin and the fiction of Georges Simeon—is the fact that
the two men, rookie cop and criminal, share not only the war-time experience
and the devastating return to a defeated nation, but evoke—as in so many
post-war Japanese movies—a sense of sexual deprivation and a aura of sexual
incompetency, a failure to interrelate with the opposite sex. Several times it
is hinted that Yusa is disinterested in “the
ladies,” despite his friendship with a ladies’ man, Yakuza-like figure. Although
she is described as Yusa’s girlfriend, Hurami insists that Yusa was simply a
boy next to whom she sat in school, which helps to explain her determined
loyalty to him; for despite the fact that he has apparently asked nothing
sexual of her, he has still awarded her a beautiful dress, which she boldly dons
when faced with the detective’s taunts, and which she later abandon's, leaving
it outside the window in the rain.
Throughout the film, family and acquaintances describe
Yusa as crying inconsolably, which upon his capture, the film visibly and
aurally recreates, helping us to realize that he is a weak, suffering being and
perhaps, within the sexual definitions of his culture, simply “unmanly.” I have
already discussed the scene in which, while visiting Sato’s peaceful and loving
home, we perceive that Murakami is a man without any of these homey comforts.
His intensely disdainful reactions during his long questioning of Harumi,
moreover, make it clear that the detective is not at all comfortable with
women, and is perhaps even hostile to the opposite sex, revealed also
early in the film in his statement that he was forced to stand next
to a woman smelling of “cheap perfume”—the accomplice who symbolically steals
his masculinity by nabbing his gun.
While Sato attempts throughout to point out the vast differences between
the detective and criminal, we feel, even at film’s end, that his distinctions
are supercilious given the intense relationship between the two, made utterly
transparent with the long, final struggle within the swampy waters, where each
temporarily tops the other only to have the position reversed. At fight’s end,
the only difference between the two is the detective’s placement of his
opponent in handcuffs, as they both, side by side, stretch out, trying to
regain their breath, Yusa breaking down into a plaintive moan.
Within that context, they both are different kinds of “stray dogs,” wild
beasts set apart from the social norm in that they can “only see what they are
after”—which in the detective’s case is the other man. At least the criminal
has an illusion of freedom, escape, or the symbol of a woman, in Harumi’s case,
with whom never consummates a true relationship. Although everyone in this film
is bathed in sweat throughout, the sweat of the two central figure’s bodies
clearly represents men in a kind of “heat,” a sweat of desire which cannot even
be cooled down with the rains that finally fall over the city and its environs.
Their sweat is not a response to the weather as much as it is a disease of
outsiders caught within a society that can only perceive them as dangerous.
Los
Angeles, May 16, 2012
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