sweating it
by Douglas Messerli
Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director)野良犬(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.
Partnered with the highly experienced Officer Sato (Takashi Shimura),
the two attempt to track down the gun, discovering almost as quickly as they
begin, that the pistol has already been used in another robbery, the victim
having been shot. Kurosawa brilliantly parallels his hero’s emotional turmoil
and his seething sense of guilt by setting the series of the film’s events in a
Tokyo heat wave, where everyone portrayed is wet with sweat. Murakami’s
restless energy, as he stands poised to jump into action upon even the
slightest of leads, is balanced by the facial calm of Sato, who not only can
point to numerous departmental commendations—plastered over the walls of his
humble home—but is blessed with three children and a supportive wife, a
situation which Murakami can only negatively compare with his own, particularly
after he shares a simple dinner at Sato’s home, his children having all fallen
asleep in one room like, as Sato’s wife describes them, a patch of pumpkins.
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.
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 film
which the director repeatedly compared to the filmmaking of Jules Dassin and
the fiction of Georges Simeon but related, as several Japanese critics have
noted, in Japanese film history to the early gay and lesbian-sensitive noirs, Yasujirō
Ozu’s Dragnet Girl and Tomu Uchida’s Police Officer, both of 1933—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 an 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
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,
he never consummates a true relationship of any kind. 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
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2012).
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