A Film Canon

Stray Dog gathers Kurosawa's previous examinations of frustrated masculinity into both a diagnosis of the post-war Japanese generation as lacking the father-figure necessary to delineate the boundaries between social and criminal behaviour, and a prescription of sustained, systematic self-policing. Hence the narrative trajectory, built around the slippery, elastic relationship between Detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) and the passage of his stolen pistol through the Tokyo cityscape, which he polices with a mounting sense of culpability, imbuing its final encounter with his partner (Takashi Shimura) with a grim fatalism redolent of noir, as does the striated, claustrophobic city itself, shadowed by the oppressive humidity of an impending storm, and beautifully elaborated in an extended, wordless montage sequence that fragments and distorts Murakami's own body into so many occluded surfaces; a topography of twitching muscle. That said, the concluding chase sequence marks a dramatic departure from this trajectory, both in the sudden movement from an urban to rural topos, and from a world-weary, jerky realism to a highly stylised, poetic irrealism, encapsulated in the balletic confrontation between Murakami and the pistol thief and, more specifically, in the spectacle of a single drop of blood falling on a white petal - a reaffirmation of the Japanese aestheticism that The Quiet Duel so virulently rejected, albeit in a more self-consciously mythical register, gesturing towards Rashomon.