Ikiru

I liked the initial idea of the film and the director, however I found it to be overlong and dull throughout. I felt a bit frustrated by the end.

A strange film this. The pace is sometime agonizingly slow, the end scenes specifically so. it could have been at least 20 minutes shorter. Saying that, the beautiful cinematography and growing relationships, as well as breakdowns in relationships is both sharp and poingnant.

Superb.

A brilliant story of human frailty and strength. Tragic and funny as is all human life. An indictment on all society in which we have so little real control over our lives in terms of work, family and health.

A wonderfully subtle depiction of one man's quiet, considered rejection of what he has done and stood for during his working life. The stultifying effects of conformist bureaucracy and hierarchy are clear without being bludgeoned as are the inevitable forces of reaction when those in authority seek to claim for themselves the glory that should rightly be Watanabe's for his determination to do something positive in his life for his society [his employers!] as it draws to its close.

Perhaps this is presumptuous, but after having seen only Rashômon and now Ikiru, I’m going to deduce the existence of what should probably be called the Kurosawian stare. It’s a stare that’s aimed at nothing in particular and implies solely a deep sense of dread and contemplation. It’s the look that all of those hearing of what happened in the forest in Rashômon give, and it’s the look that Kenji Watanabe in Ikiru gives for most of the film when discovering he has stomach cancer and only a year to live.

Don’t start thinking of something like The Bucket List now I’ve given you the general plot; don’t allow thoughts of excess softness and sentimentality to come rushing to your mind. Kenji isn’t stupidly stoic about death, nor does he have an itinerary of things he wants to go around ticking off with a smile on his face before resigning himself quite happily to the grave. Kenji becomes a haunted man, and the biggest cause of it is his realisation that he hasn’t done anything for his entire life. I’m guessing Kurosawa hadn’t read Marx, but Kenji’s a perfect study of alienation. He’s literally a rubber stamp, consenting to or rejecting forms in a Japanese bureaucracy for thirty years without pause. On the first day of his life in which he is no longer sleepwalking through it, he visits a bar and meets a man that sums it up perfectly: ‘Men are such idiots. They only realise life’s beauty when faced with death… you’ve been a slave to life; now you’re trying to master it.’ That is, indeed, Kenji Watanabe’s new aim, and eventually master it he does.

He tries out different things, determined to find something that pleases him and injects meaning into his final days, and after starting, naturally, with the hedonistic option of an evening partying in Japanese music bars, he eventually draws inspiration from a woman whose lust for life is at a level he knows he can only hope to replicate for at least some of his remaining days. She tells of the satisfaction she gains from working on and shaping toys for children, and suddenly he realises the potential that laid dormant in his job for all these years. Women had recently tried to use his office to get a reconstruction project going, to turn an old worn-down site into a joyful playground for children. He’d pushed them on by referring them to another department, and after being tossed back and forward they had given up hope. But now he sees the potential to finally do something good, and seizes the opportunity by fighting the bureaucrats above him, and getting that playground made.

It baffles his fellow workers. After his death, they contemplate what on earth had provoked him to be let loose on this existential rampage. But then soon they come to grips with the fact that they live as dogmatically as he did, and like that wise man in the bar had said, it was indeed only news of death that got Watanabe to live.