IKIRU Movie Review

To Live
Doomed
Living

Describing Ikiru to friends who haven't seen it often provokes a polite but unenthusiastic response. When they learn that it's about a aging bureaucrat who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, they may understandably think that, well, it may indeed be a classic and sure, it might actually be good … but why should they put themselves through it? All I can say to that is that there probably hasn't been a day of my life since seeing Ikiru (nearly 30 years ago) that I haven't been reminded of how it has become a companion to me—an indispensable part of my experience. Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura),the everyman who is the hero of Ikiru (To Live), sits behind his stack of ever-growing papers at his desk in a city office, as he has each workday for a quarter-century, waiting out his time. His wife died years ago and his child is no longer close to him—he has only his meaningless, ineffectual job, and perhaps six more months in which to contemplate what his life has been and now has become. In the hands of Akira Kurosawa, this seeming recipe for a maudlin movie-of-the-week is transformed into a thrilling adventure—an interior journey by an ordinary man that is free of unearned sentiment or false gloss. Kurosawa's unflinching vision of a man with no excuses left, searching for a way to make a mark on his bleak universe—to find some meaning to his life before he vanishes without a trace—is one of the cinema's noblest, most humane pinnacles. With one wrenching but deeply reassuring image of an old man on a swing, quietly pulling something from deep within him for the first and last time, Kurosawa—while refusing to tie all the senseless strands of our lives into a neat bow—has advanced humankind's knowledge of itself, and justified one of its arts.

NEXT STOP … The Magnificent Ambersons, Rashomon, A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)

1952 134m/B JP Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagari, Yunosuke Ito; D: Akira Kurosawa; W: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni; C: Asakazu Nakai; M: Fumio Hayasaka. VHS, LV HMV, CRC, FCT