Ikiru
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Starring Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagiri, and
Yunosuke Ito
Japan, 1952, 143 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles
Reviewed by Daniel Saunders
You may not have heard of "Ikiru", but it's considered to be one of the classics of foreign cinema, and one of the finest films ever made. It is in black and white, 2 1/2 hours long, directed by Akira Kurosawa, and set in contemporary Japan. It is a story about the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracies, the power of the individual to make change, and the importance of living a meaningful life. Watanabe is a middle-aged petty bureaucrat, the chief of the Citizen's section of town hall. As a rather intrusive voice-over tells us, "He has gastric cancer, although he doesn't know it yet. In fact he's already dead. He's been dead for the last thirty years." He shuffles papers on his desk and looks busy.
Meanwhile a group of women from a nearby slum area have come to town hall to complain about a cesspool near their homes. Their request is that it be drained and replaced with a playground. They are shunted from one bureau to another, from Citizen's, to Public Works, to Parks, to the Deputy Mayor, and then back to the beginning. The bureaucratic techniques of passing the buck and stalling are well illustrated.
Watanabe, experiencing stomach pain, goes in for an X-ray and figures out (although the doctors won't tell him) that he has less than six months to live. The first half of the film is all about his various reactions to this death sentence. He tries to make peace with his son, for who's sake he closed himself off after his wife died, and with his daughter-in-law, but he doesn't tell them about the illness. He withdraws his savings and spends a decadent night on the town with a self-styled Mephistopheles, a writer he met in a bar. He forms an attachment with a young woman in his office. None of these help in the end, until he remembers the cesspool. The first half ends with him pledging to build the playground at whatever the cost.
The second half is told in flashback from his funeral, where all the civil servants are gathered, swapping stories of Watanabe's almost fanatical devotion to the project. They end with teary, alcohol induced pledges to all behave like Watanabe. However the next day we find exactly the same situation as the beginning of the film.
This is not a light film. Most of my family had left by the time it was over, finding it just too slow. I found, however, that if you stick with it, you become involved in the plotline and stirred by its humanistic message. One great strength is a masterful performance by Takashi Shimura as Watanabe. He played the benevolent samurai leader Kambei in "The Seven Samurai", and here he convincingly portrays a sad, sick old man, looking back over his life and seeing only emptiness. Actually one thing that made it especially enjoyable for me was spotting actors from other Kurosawa films. Like some other great directors, he has a "family" of actors that he uses frequently in his films, and almost all of the seven samurai can be spotted in "Ikiru", as well as some of the actors from "Rashomon". If you're in the mood for a slower paced but powerful, life-affirming movie, "Ikiru" is an excellent choice.
-- Daniel Saunders, roving movie critic of no fixed address Have a day. :-|
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