Akira Kurosawa: Drunken Angel

Thank heaven for the much awaited Criterion DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948). “Much awaited” for this being the first of the Kurosawa films to feature Toshirô Mifune, and the first to feature Mifune acting the young hothead to Takashi Shimura’s sensei figure.

I swear, I totally was rooting for Mifune’s tubercular character Matsunaga, to really make a break from the yakuza scene, culture, way of life, and in doing so, heal himself. I don’t know that he was made to be a morally conflicted thus sympathetic character, so I am thinking it was in his apparent self-destruction, anxiety (as evidenced by that dream sequence of his dead self chasing his beautiful self through ocean waves, and which actually reminded us of the video for The Cure’s “Close to Me”), and his being rather pathetic, flailing around drunk and flying off the handle in violent fits, becoming increasingly sallow and coughing up blood when he should be winning a knife fight.

This self-made mess of a man mirrors the slum mess and disease infested toxic bodies of water of post-war urban Japan, in which Kurosawa gives us these wrecked people who have to somehow find ways to heal themselves. Shimura’s character Sanada is the scruffy alcoholic doctor who’s fed up with a Japan “always making useless sacrifices,” as much as he’s fed up with yakuza who seem to him an obsolete trope of meaningless codes of behavior of loyalty or brotherhood. He’s fed up enough to stand up to the yakuza boss Okada to tell him how deluded his notions of power, not thinking (not caring) this dude could take him out without reprisal.

So as Matsunaga’s tuberculosis becomes more advanced, Sanada, in trying to care for Matsunaga, becomes less of a pathetic alcoholic, no longer pouring tea into bottles of rubbing alcohol as he’s quickly consumed his ration of booze, and rather, actually having in order his clinic and household, where he’s taken in both Matsunaga and a young former mistress of the yakuza boss. He’s cured her of VD (and imagine what a stigma that must have had; certainly the connotations of “VD” are much different than a kinder, gentler “STD”), and now she works as his assistant, rather than as some dance club dame.

So these public health epidemics of bacterial infection/infestation are the figurative post-war Japan urban socioeconomic and cultural squalor and depravity. And part of this depravity coincides with the English language signs outside dance halls and bars. Maybe not so coincidental.

Back to Matsunaga, who can’t stop being yakuza, despite that his sickness has lowered his rank; yo man, it’s hard to he a gangsta. He’s so sadly descended, and that’s why I was rooting for him to just let it go already. It’s that trainwreck that you don’t want to watch but you do.

Of course he doesn’t let it go and what ensues is what’s become (in my mind) classic Kurosawa: the knock down drag out dirty man dogfight, here between Matsunaga and Okada, where each man’s facial expressions and body language do not conceal that they are terrified shitless; they tremble, flail, flop, and fall all over the ground, lunge at each other desperately and uncalculated. They become all disheveled and sweaty, and then end up outside of the apartment and in the hallway, spill a can of white paint all over the floor, where they both get covered in white paint, as do the floors and the walls. Needless to say I love that these fight scenes are messy and dirty, that the loser dies an undignified death, splayed all over the ground and unheroic. Think of Stray Dog, in which Mifune and his doppelganger end up in the mud, and at the end of the fight, the loser literally cries like a wailing child. Or the fight between the bandit and the samurai in Rashomon, where both men are trembling and tripping over the terrain and their own bodies, after talking up such bravado.