#China Film Archive 4K Restoration
"The Desire of Life" is the fifth part of the Kurosawa Akira Film Festival. In addition to the "Rashomon" that I had enjoyed on the online disk earlier, the desire for life did not clearly demonstrate the spirit of Bushido that Kurosawa Akira admired. The core of it, but it is the one that makes me the most sentimental.
There are not many movies with similar themes in the history of film, and the best healing movie of all Americans "What a Wonderful Life" is one of them. But unlike "Life", "What a Beautiful Life" is full of American optimism and the dreamer plot of "everything will be fine". A pessimistic smile of relief. "Life" is different. Even though the cry of the villagers at the end has the power to heal, but behind this, it is more to arouse the audience's reflection on the Japanese bureaucracy and regret for the honest and clean government. I don't want to get too involved in politics in this post, but just about the emotional turmoil it provokes.
#The rare happy ending in the Kurosawa movie
In my opinion "Desire to Live" is a comedy. Although it has always been considered silly and superficial to use tragic comedy to delineate the scope of a movie, I still want to give this definition briefly. After all, when people divide tragicomedy, it is less based on the plot and more on the similarities and differences of each person's values. When Watanabe was swinging with the singing in the park, he had completed the fulfillment and realization of his desire for life, and also reached the value transcendence in the last period of his life. This can not be called a comedy of spiritual values. Death is not a sign of tragedy. In "Seven Samurai", the last surviving samurai did not receive the heroic sacrifice of the samurai, but only witnessed the utilitarianism of the villagers, which became a tragedy for the living.
And in Watanabe's mediocre life, in which he could only seek comfort from a simple girl in the end, the detachment at the last moment of his life can be said to be a kind of sublimation. That's why I call it comedy.
#The irony effect of the double-paragraph structure
Many have questioned the film's two-part structure, and have even called the funeral and backtracking in the second half a wasteful and pointless repetition. However, if the second half of the film is lacking, the ironic strength and moving effect of the whole film will be greatly reduced or even completely lost. The complete story of Watanabe's self-redemption, which is a little fuller in the discourses of others, supplemented by the completely different concepts and interrogation and debate of the two factions, also questioned Watanabe's values and even society's outlook on life.
Although most people are more familiar with the mapping and intuitive display of the Bushido spirit in Akira Kurosawa's films, the irony of realistic issues in his films is not uncommon. The most intuitive and covers many grand issues of human beings should be "Dream". The slightly boring film of two hours and eight stories discusses environmental pollution, nuclear pollution and other issues in a straightforward and even abrupt manner. Watanabe, who was nearly 90 at the time, As a vicissitudes of life, the worries about the fate of mankind come one by one. In fact, I can't accept such an overly intuitive method. Many of the lines are so straightforward that it is offensive, and some are similar to God's preaching, which is quite innocuous. Although the irony in "Life" is also intuitive and sharp, the introspection of human beings is much deeper than that in "Dream".
The recent Kurosawa movie viewing should come to an end. 2019 is a brand new beginning. It is a year of planned movie watching and reading. With the leisure of freshman year and the geographical advantage of being finally located in Beijing, the year-end report of 2019 will be different, right?
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