This one has been a long time coming. In one of life’s not-funny coincidences, I’ve been delaying most of my writing projects lately as I’ve been helping out some friends who are struggling with a serious illness in the family, and it has kept me from getting to this anywhere near as quickly as I’d have liked. Hopefully Seven Samurai will be a little quicker in getting done.
Ikiru
I’ve heard it said that you can roughly divide Kurosawa’s filmography into three distinct types. His most famous of course are the Samurai period dramas and action movies, with the other two being his crime thrillers and his more sentimental examinations of individuals living in modern (to their respective time period) Japan. Of that third category, Ikiru is usually cited as his masterpiece, and many critics place it among the best of his work overall.
It’s difficult, though, to describe this movie to someone who has never seen it without it sounding like the worst sorts of cliche. Watanabe learns he has terminal cancer and has less than a year to live. He despairs his wasted years doing nothing of importance as a bureaucrat in city hall, he struggles to repair his faltering relationship with his adult son, he tries to kill himself with excess, he tries to fill his despair with the vicarious exuberance of a colleague, and then he finally finds a project that gives his life meaning. You’d be forgiven for thinking this sounds like any number of other stories that use dying to teach the audience about living–”Living” even being the meaning of the title.
What sets Ikiru apart is that it never plays into those cliches. It’s not so much that the movie goes off the beaten path of the formula; it’s more that it never sets foot there to begin with. His attempts to open up to his son sputter out and never gain traction. His night of debauchery never becomes more exciting than sad songs and replacing a stolen hat. And the most striking example are his social outings with Odagiri, a young woman who works for him and is looking to quit so she can go make toys. His devotion to her isn’t romantic, or sexual, or even paternal exactly. It’s almost parasitic, in that he just wants to be close to someone who has found a way to enjoy life, and as their meetings continue, she becomes visibly less and less comfortable with him. She is the only person he opens up to about his impending death, and in a lesser movie this would be something of a breakthrough, and she’d become the person he can rely on. Instead she leaves looking terrified, ending their friendship and stepping out of the movie for good.
In their last dinner together, she explains to him that the reason she enjoys making toys is because she likes making something that brings others joy. For Watanabe, who feels his job does nothing productive, this touches a desire to help others that he didn’t even realize he had. As he leaves the restaurant, the waitresses sing “Happy Birthday,” and an instrumental version of the song continues into the next scene, suggesting that Watanabe is reborn. He finds renewed vigor as he makes preparations to help a group of persistent women, who have been given the runaround by his office for months in their attempts to have a playground built in their neighborhood. Just as he’s beginning to find his purpose, the movie cuts forward in time, to his funeral.
The final act of the movie features his coworkers and family and acquaintances reminiscing about him. Again, a lesser movie would have his efforts finally appreciated and recognized after the fact. Instead, we have others eager to take credit for his work, his son quietly processing the realization that his father knew he was going to die, and when a few of them drunkenly do recognize Watanabe’s efforts and vow to live better lives, it’s clear that the determination will evaporate as soon as they’ve sobered up. The self-awareness on display in this scene is magnificent, as one of the workers gripes that even getting a trash can emptied requires a stack of paperwork that will fill it right back up.
Takashi Shimura, who has featured in almost every Kurosawa film to this point, plays Watanabe as a man who is almost haunted. Haunted by his own impending death; haunted by the life he’s wasted. His expression of unending misery is so exaggerated as to be almost pantomime, and there are times that it actually goes so far as to pull me out of the scene. I’m hard pressed to say that it is “too much,” though, as the choice pays off in the last shots of Watanabe in the film. A police officer arrives at his funeral to pay his respects, and says he saw Watanabe on the swing shortly before. We’re given a brief flashback of Watanabe on the swing. The police officer says he looked happy, and the face we see is one that is peaceful. Without the pantomime-misery expression throughout, it’s hard to imagine that a simply peaceful face would mean so much when it finally comes.
Overall Grade: A+. While I don’t think it’s a personal favorite of Kurosawa’s filmography for myself, it’s undeniably great, and not one to be missed.
Noteworthy shots: There are many here that deserve mention, including the famous scene of Watanabe exiting the hospital in silence before the noise of the street arrives suddenly and seems to wake him from his trance; the shot of “Mephistopholes” watching Watanabe sing the Gondola Song with the contrast of his deeply saddened face framed by party streamers dangling from his hat; and the shot of the deputy mayor contemptuously checking his pocket watch at Watanabe’s funeral. The one that sits with me though is at the very end. In the funeral scene, Watanabe’s coworker Kimura soberly criticizes the hypocrisy of the others, and it’s this criticism that convinces them to commit to doing better. However, a few minutes later we’re shown a later day in the office. The new man in Watanabe’s position (one of the ones who most ardently expressed his desire to do better) is handed a proposal, and simply passes it on to another department, the same kind of runaround that was killing projects before. Kimura stands up and glares at him, but finds everyone glaring back, all of them knowing that they don’t have the resolve to follow through. Kimura sits back down, literally vanishing behind a mountain of paperwork, the man overcome by the monument of his position.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/wvzst1/watching_almost_every_kurosawa_film_in_order_part/
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