In Kurosawa's IKIRU (“to live”), a voice-over proclaims the death sentence of our protagonist right out of the box, the middle-aged government functionary Kanji Watanabe (Shimura), who has been living like a “mummy” for 30 years within the Byzantine bureaucratic machine of doing nothing, is diagnosed with stomach cancer and has less than a year to live, the hospital scene is done with terrific irony when doctors overtly circumvent Hippocratic oath and fob him off with palliative lies, for piteous terminal patients , truth is negligible.
His impending mortality jolts Kanji to introspect his futile life, a widower devotes all his life in front of the cleric desk to assign red tape, and raises his only son Mitsuo (Kaneko) by himself, whom he is demoralized to find more interested in his pensions than his well-being. A sorrow-drowning Kanji exchanges his maudlin new perspective on life with a middle-brow novelist (Itô), who chaperons him through one whole night of pleasure-seeking (gambling, clubbing, booze, female accompaniment, what else?) to make him feel alive, but that hedonistic overload cannot assuage his inconsolable despair, only by way of the interaction with a pert subordinate Toyo (Odagiri), whose youthful gusto enraptures his moribund soul, and who becomes an unwitting savior that thrusts him to fulfill one good thing before he crosses the great divide.
As audience has been witnessing Kanji's wistful attempt of seeking out a redemption for his meaningless life firsthand, Kurosawa squarely changes the narrative viewpoint in the last hour of the story, by announcing that Kanji has died months later and whereupon he devises a RASHMON-esque postmortem from Kanji's colleagues during his wake, wondering why a stick-in-the-mud like Kanji, has pulled out all the stops in his last days to achieve one good deed: changing a cesspool into a playground for the locals, a proposition which he shirks earlier and, then passes around in an ouroboric turn inside the bureaucratic system.
Through their recollections of Kanji's dogged action to ensure the proposition to be green-lit by the sanctimonious Deputy Mayor (Nakamura), they seem to get the bottom of Kanji's motivation, although Kurosawa's modus operandi is bogged down by its protracted length of proselytizing and a fact that, we audience are already in the knowing, so the guessing game becomes a tad monotonous, plus, it is simply too unsympathetic to assume that no one cares to give a damn about Kanji's deteriorating health, after seeing him doddering in the city hall in such a ghastly condition, yet no one suspects that he is terminally ill, which just doesn't compute in hindsight. Finally spurred by Dutch courage, his successor Ono (Fujiwara, shepherding a fine cluster of supporting actors to enact a scattershot brainstorm) and co. swear to emulate him in their actions,but will tomorrow be a different day? It turns out that Kurosawa does have some astringent grievance to take up on Japan's post-war rubber-stamps.
In the leading role, Takashi Shimura takes the rein with his extraordinary immersion into his character of a man whose clock is ticking, with his halting utterance and hunkering appearance, pathos and humanity slowly seep from a pipsqueak anti-hero figure, a cog in the machine might feel too close to home for the multitude, yet, his transmigration is completely validated in the end; among a vast group of subservient players, a greenhorn Miki Odagiri is spontaneously ingenuous and sparkling prima facie, then stalwartly holds herself against a heart- rendering Shimura during the key moment, when Kanji gains his rebirth, cued by a parallel Happy Birthday tune in the background and showing up Kurosawa's incredible deep focus literacy. Not this reviewer's favorite among his formidable corpus,but IKIRU is an illumining and reverent masterwork notwithstanding, both as a biting social critique and a haunting self-reflective examination.
referential entries: Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW (1963, 8.5/10), RASHOMON (1950, 8.8/10).
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