Stray Dog

I'm told that Akira Kurosawa owes more to Dosteivsky than to Japenese film making. This is ever so clear in a film like "Stray Dog." Murakami a young police detective has his gun stolen from him one day and immediately accepts that he should be fired. Instead he is assigned to the detective in charge of tracking down his gun. Eventually the gun makes its way to an illegal dealer who lends it to a criminal. The criminal begins committing crimes with Murakami's gun and the search for the gun and criminal becomes more intense.

There are two things going on in this film. The first the rather nicely conceived plot of two detectives tracking down a killer by use of interviews, intuition and other classic detective techniques that have been glossed over by CSI and its knock offs. The second thing is the Dosteivsky inspired look at mankind and the things that make us who we are. Murakami is a veteran of WWII, so is the killer. Both had bad experiences once back from the war. One became a cop, the other a criminal. They might seem trite but Kurosawa manages nicely.

There are nice moments between the young and naive Murakami and his wiser and older partner Sato. There is also a long series of scenes where Murakami wanders the slums of the city disguised as a down on his luck drifter. We see alleys and hovels and general masses of the disenfranchised creating a beautiful yet tragic image of post war Japan. Perhaps not an accurate one but a world that feels lived in and could shape who these characters are. Its good in that it is both a smart mystery and smart about the questions it wants to raise, not in a heavy handed way but in the same way that made those Russian literary masters so great.