the lower depths imdb
Share. Yet before he arrives and after he has left, there nonetheless remains a minimal spirit of camaraderie. The story takes place in the outskirts of Paris in a poorhouse where Pépel (Jean Gabin), a thief, is planning a raiding. The struggles of poverty is the main focus in this movie from Akira Kurosawa. A Japanese general and his men disguise themselves as monks in order to pass an enemy border patrol. Lower Depths is an intricate story of poverty and those who fall into the deepest of socioeconomic despair based on the writer Maxim Gorky's play with the same name. A Japanese veteran, driven partially mad from the war, travels to the snowy island of Hokkaido where he soon enters a love triangle with his best friend and a disgraced woman. The daughter of a politically disgraced university professor struggles to find a place for herself in love and life, in the uncertain world of Japan leading into WWII. Narratively it is a series of simultaneous little stories across just a few sets, preserving the play-like nature of the source material. Menu. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Topics Drama, Comedy, Alcoholism, Gambling, Adultery, Suicides, Poverty, Peasants, Landlords, Landladies, Travelers, Diseases, Betrayal Language Japanese. 2014 Film Viewing Resolution #6 The first film from Jean Renoir in quite some time, long after not being that impressed with his so-called masterpiece, The Rules of the Game; the long-awaited follow-up being Renoir's film adaptation of Maxim Gorky's best-known play, The Lower Depths...oddly enough, a French/Russian co-production with the intent of showcasing the two countries new-found friendship. In medieval Japan, aging Rokubei, his younger wife of four years Osugi and her uncle run a tenement complex at the bottom of a cliff, the complex which from the naked eye at the top of the cliff looks like nothing more than a rubbish heap. This is a formless film, without a main character. The hoary Japanese adage "uso mo houben", often rendered "a white lie can be expedient", could have been a tagline for this movie; for the alcoholic ex-actor and several others have little other than self-delusion to help them get through another day.Kurosawa manages to inject a measure of droll comedy while keeping the grim facts unprettified, showing us how the luckless souls at the very bottom of society grasp at the slimmest of hopes and somehow manage (...or don't manage) to keep on going. View production, box office, & company info. Meanwhile the thief seeks the love of a young woman, who is held emotionally captive by her slumlord family. Reviews: The Lower Depths. The Lower Depths (French: Les Bas-fonds) is a 1936 French drama film directed by Jean Renoir, based on the 1902 play of the same title by Maxim Gorky. Much of the film involves the hopes, dreams, schemes and machinations of a handful of characters, all fixated on escaping the tenement and its soul-numbing poverty.An enigmatic old man who appears one day and spends some time in the hovel has a salutary effect on several of the residents, merely by dint of a level of kindness and sympathy that any of us would take for granted. Get a sneak peek of the new version of this page. Popular reviews More. Use the HTML below. This above all works well here, for the Japanese themselves have a utilitarian (so to speak) view of truth and falsehoods. However The Lower Depths is probably the most pessimistic film he made about feudal Japan. Maxim Gorki was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhy Novgorod, Russia, on March 16, 1868. The film is an example of the poetic realism. Renoir, working amidst the rise of Hitler and the Popular Front in France, had need to take license with the dark nature of Gorky's source material, softening its bleak outlook.