Ikiru (1952)

26Aug09

Ikiru IMDB Link

Directed By: Akira Kurosawa

Written By: Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto

Starring: Takashi Shimura

John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence contains the single most cringe worthy scene I’ve ever seen. There’s no blood or torture, only a wife off her rocker trying to host her husband’s construction buddies at dinner and my seat was squeaking due to my discomfort and constant re-shifting. Mind you, this was after years of watching Kevin on The Wonder Years perform red faced head slapping embarrassing moments one after another. ( I heard Paul is actually Marilyn Manson btw).

And while that scene specifically might be the most cringe worthy scene I think cheese is an overarching feeling that really makes me squirm. Sometimes cheese is a lot of fun like watching slow claps in 80’s movies but I try and avoid cheese in feel good Frank Kapra-esque movies. I knew going into Ikiru that it was about a dying man and I knew there would be a scene with him on a swing in the snow as I’ve seen that image countless times. But it’s Kurosawa, the OG, I had to give it a chance.

The film starts out with an X-Ray of our protagonist Watanabe played amazingly by Shimura. We learn that he’s been a bureaucrat for over 20 years; surviving but not really living. And unknown to him, he has less than a year to live. Kurosawa begins the tale with amazing storytelling using a voice over but quickly jumps into a great montage with comedic moments about the nature of bureaucracy. He frames people in squares of piles of paperwork to show just how much they have to do and just how little they care to do it. And then in rapid succession we see a group of women trying to get something fixed with every department telling them to go to another department.

Watanabe learns about his eventual death in a great scene at the hospital. Instead of the doctor just coming out and telling him, Kuosawa has a fast talking mosquito of a guy bothering Watanabe, going on and on and unknowingly revealing to Watanabe that not only will he die but if the doctor tells him that he can eat anything, he’ll definitely die within the year. When he goes into the doctor’s office his face turn’s pale as the doctor tells him it’s nothing and that he can eat anything he wants. That night he realizes that it’s not the dying that he’s afraid of, it’s the fact that he really hasn’t lived.

There’s a lot of sorrow, a night on the town filled with debauchery trying to catch up on lost times. Eventually he comes to the realization that he should instead do something meaningful, perhaps actually help people in his bureaucratic position instead of being red tape. He grabs his hat and rushes out the door ready to change the world. And this is when the movie really became interesting to me. A car horn is heard in the background and then it fades to his funeral. I was 100% expecting a happy-go lucky montage of him helping people with their faces glowing but instead Kurosawa leads brings us to his death with the Mayor underplaying what Watanabe did trying to take all the credit.

Slowly the other bureaucrats drink and talk and through them we see moments in his undertaking to build a park in a dilapidated neighborhood. A quick scene of him hunched over in pain in the office, him falling while walking in the park during construction only to have the residents come to his aid, a smile told through his eyes as he gazes on what he’s creating. It was all very cheesy but it wasn’t. Not only was there the interesting layer of finding out what happened with disjointed scene’s you puzzle together in your head but you also had the men arguing, each with a specific personality about how much or how little Watanabe had to do with the project. Surely he was just a cog in the machine says one while another stoically in the corner defends Watanabe and how much he accomplished.

And to top it all off we have the extra layer of his son slowly realizing that his father tried to tell him of his impending death but his son was too preoccupied and annoyed to even bother to listen to him. The best part? The movie really doesn’t end on an up note, it goes higher and higher then brings you back down into reality. A film still brimming with cheese but again, Kurosawa, the OG comes through with the craft and it overwhelmed any of my beef with cheesiness.

Filed under: Classic/Old, Drama, Foreign   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Ikiru, Kurosawa, movie review, To Live