Exterior night.

Fixed camera and close-up on a puddle.

It's raining.

White Japanese ideograms, the opening credits.

A lugubrious, heavy, dark, and vaguely menacing music.

This is how "Drunken Angel" (Yoidore tenshi), the eighth feature film by Akira Kurosawa, then 38 years old, begins.

There are two main characters. Sanada (Takashi Shimura) is the doctor, the drunken angel. Matsunaga (a young Toshiro Mifune, making his debut here) is the crook. Around them, a small poor and filthy village (a symbol of a Japan devastated by the post-war period) surrounded by an open-air sewer dispensing tuberculosis.

Matsunaga catches it, and the doctor, an alcoholic with somewhat brusque manners, will try to cure him.

The young Matsunaga is handsome, strong, has money and women; he is practically the leader of the village, part of the Yakuza clan, a real braggart, but now he also has tuberculosis.

A really strange couple (these two actors will become iconic actors of many future films by the eastern master).

The movie is beautiful. The two of them are extraordinary, the dialogues are magnificent.

What struck me the most is Kurosawa's indictment of real mainstays of the ancient Japanese culture. Speaking of honor and unconditional loyalty, even at the cost of life, of feudalism, key concepts of the samurai and his lord, and by reflection of criminals and their subordinates.

Speaking of the concept of "ownership" of a person, of a woman for example, regarded as an object.

Kurosawa, for the first time free from the censorial yoke imposed at that time, clearly very restrictive, throws himself into an unequivocal indictment against all these aspects. He does so through the doctor, sloppy and alcoholic but with strong ethical and moral principles, a righteous man in the true sense of the word, a man who, despite his appearance and condition, always raises the flag of rationality high.

Memorable his je accuse "Japanese people often do useless and stupid things" "it is irrelevant whether you know whether your wife is here or not if you do not want to see her anymore... have you ever heard of gender equality?" and I won't mention any more because I don't remember the words very well, but they are truly weighty, catacombal stones on many ancient Japanese bullshit. Bullshit, yes, I call them that because I think like Kurosawa.

Following that, I made another consideration: it often happens that the great artists in history, of every era and every form of art, are often outside their time, their latitude, or rather not outside but above. They are men without time, really little contaminated in the brain, or not at all, by the culture and beliefs of their times.

This is, to me, a characteristic symptom of true greatness, not only artistic.

When great art in a man is accompanied by a great personality, masters are born.

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