Japan drama
1952
bw 142 min.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
CLV: $59.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1224L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
In
the movies as in life, love and death hold sway, exerting an irresistible
attraction on our imagination. Love usually dominates in cinema; we sit entranced
for hours as affairs of the heart wax and wane. Death seldom holds the field for
so long, but erupts in spectacular finales or provocative opening scenes,
functioning as punctuation or plot resolution, hardly ever insisting that we
confront our own mortality. Serious films about death are rare, success in this
genre even rarer.Kurosawa challenges this tradition immediately.
Ikiru's first image is an x-ray; a voice reveals the diagnosis is cancer.
Kenji Watanabe, we soon learn, has six months to live. Ikiru encompasses
these six months; by facing this death Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life,
characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man's fate.
Of the origin
of Ikiru, Kurosawa has said, "Occasionally I think of my death . . . then
I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath; while living a life like
this, how could I leave it?"
But the task for Watanabe, played by Takashi
Shimura with almost painful intensity, seems just the opposite of this. Not how
to bear leaving a vibrant life, but how to charge empty existence with
significance enough that leaving matters. For Watanabe, we are told, has been
dead for twenty-five years, buried in a pattern of meaningless routine. We meet
him at his desk in City Hall, stamping documents that exist only to be stamped,
surrounded by subordinates who will soon be as moribund as he.
Kurosawa affirms
the futility of such a life when some women come to request that a playground be
built. Shunted heedlessly from office to office, they end where they began, angry
and defeated. Sixteen wipes, probably more than one could find in the whole of
western cinema in the preceding decade, give point and intensity, rhythm and
dynamism to this indictment of Japanese bureaucracy.
At this point Watanabe
learns of his death sentence and Ikiru's unrelenting focus on death
becomes a search for meaning in life, presented in two uneven halves. In the
first the bustle and energy of contemporary Tokyo provide the setting for
Watanabe's stunned acceptance of his fate, evoking a struggle to awaken to life
before he loses it. The second, five months later at Watanabe's wake, offers a
retrospective view of this awakening and its failure to change the life of his
colleagues.
Watanabe's search, accentuated by movement, noise, a flow of people
and places, reaches its cinematic peak in the Faustian night-town sequence.
Unable to talk to his family, Watanabe confides his despair to a writer
encountered in a bar. Though the most serious talk of life and death in the film
occurs here, the result is a descent into hell. The writer calls himself
Mephistopheles, "but a virtuous one who won't demand payment" -- an ironic
virtue, indeed, since the payment, Watanabe's death, has already been exacted. In
response to despair, Mephistopheles offers pleasure, wine, women and song. They
plunge into the Tokyo night of surging crowds, blaring western music, glittering
reflective surfaces, with Watanabe forever a small knot of bewildered pain in
this teeming sea of pleasure. His one instance of solace, the one genuine moment
for him, comes as he stolidly sings an old love song, "Life is so short/Fall in
love, dear maiden" rather to the horror of those surrounding him. Brilliant and
dreadful, this night-town scene perhaps begins Watanabe's awakening; he learns
something: pleasure is not life.
Next, more modestly, he clings to a young
former colleague who offers something more comforting than pleasure, human
companionship, then finally, the spark that rekindles life, a toy rabbit.
Watanabe clutches it and starts down the stairs, his rebirth bright on the
soundtrack in the voices from across the room singing "Happy Birthday," heard
through the next scene as, back in his office, Watanabe searches out the petition
for a playground and hurries out into the rain -- committed to action, free of
despair.
Cut to a picture of Watanabe on his funeral altar as the narrator
says, "Five months later our hero died." A new style, static and visually spare,
fits this ceremonial gathering of family, colleagues and superiors, in formal
dress and formally arranged, but growing progressively more drunk and
disorganized as they discuss Watanabe with varying degrees of hypocrisy,
misunderstanding and, rarely, sympathy, with the most profound and sincere grief
expressed in a brief interruption by women of the playground. Through this long
scene in which every word and gesture is significant, a series of flashbacks --
without ever showing the crucial moments or decisions -- reveal the true story of
the playground, ending with one of the most poignant images in cinema: Watanabe
in the softly falling snow, swinging slowly in the children's playground, singing
to himself, "Life is so short/Fall in love, dear maiden" -- now no mere moment of
solace but the inner voice of a life regained and so, worth losing.
Kurosawa's
stature in the West stems primarily from our response to his samurai films, from
Rashomon to Ran, filled by exotic characters with familiar
emotions, action and conflict and dazzling passages of masterful cinematic
creation. By contrast Ikiru is quiet and contemplative, and surely less
entertaining. Yet critics both East and West have called it Kurosawa's greatest
achievement -- attributing to this one lonely death more weight than that of
forty bandits killed with such bravado in Seven Samurai I am not sure that
I agree, but why should an artist be limited to one masterpiece?
-- ALEXANDER
SESONSKE
Credits
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Scenario: Shinobu
Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Asaichi Nakai
Art
Direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Lighting: Shigeru Mori
Sound: Fumio
Yanoguchi
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Producer: Sojiro
Motoki
Transfer
This edition of Ikiru was transferred from
a 35mm master print.