☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Ikiru (1952) – A. Kurosawa
An existential classic from Akira Kurosawa. One of my favourites from years ago but I was worried it might be too sentimental upon this rewatch. Takashi Shimura (later the head of the Seven Samurai, 1954) plays Watanabe, chief of the public liaison section of city hall, a petty bureaucrat who has spent 30 years pushing papers and referring community members to other sections. The film opens just as Watanabe finds out that he has stomach cancer and may have only six months to live. The first half of the film shows us Watanabe’s immediate reaction: first, despair; then, giving in to total hedonism; then, seeking human connection (first with his son and daughter-in-law who essentially reject him, then with a younger co-worker who ultimately finds him weirdly desperate); finally, he decides to use his final months to do something meaningful. Earlier, we had seen a group of women petitioning the city to convert a disused swampy area into a children’s playground, but Watanabe’s section (and all the other sections) gave them the run-around. Now, Watanabe decides to break the impasse and make the project a reality. Fast forward five months and we are now at Watanabe’s wake, attended by the Deputy Mayor, his senior advisors and section chiefs, and, of course, Watanabe’s own section members and his family. The second half of the film shows us the different reactions of all of these people to Watanabe’s final actions (in a Rashomon-like display of perceptual biases). The Deputy Mayor seeks to take all of the credit for the playground himself while his senior advisors all suck up to him and agree. After they have quickly excused themselves from the wake, Watanabe’s staff review all of the events of the previous few months (in flashback) to give us a portrait of Watanabe as single-mindedly determined to get the project done despite many bureaucratic hurdles and setbacks (this is, in essence, a scathing satire of Japanese society at the time). Naturally heartstrings are tugged but not in a heavy-handed way. Shimura underplays the grey man so much so that he is very nearly characterless but in the end his actions – and therefore his life -- have made a real difference to the world. And that’s what it’s all about. (I have not been drawn to watch the recent remake with Bill Nighy in the Shimura role, Living, 2022).
