For most of the film “our protagonist” Kanji Watanabe is bent over, head hanging down, face fallen, in visible pain, whether from his disease, from his perception of personal and professional failure, or both.

Having spent the last seven years hanging its head in shame after surrendering at the end of WWII, I can also feel, through this movie, Japan’s pain and the beginnings of its search for a new identity and direction.

I did get a little weary of Watanabe’s (Takashi Shimura) bug-eyed frown, but that made it all the more dramatic when he was laughing with the young lady from his office, Odagiri. He looked like an entirely different person then. Although his acting was somewhat overly dramatic, and the camera shots of his face were sometimes too drawn out, he and the other actors did a superb job of conveying the myriad of emotions they were experiencing, all within a traditional Japanese reserve.

The video quality was fantastic, and some of the camera angles that I especially enjoyed were 1) the scene in the (first) bar when Watanabe and his new writer-friend are both looking down at the dog eating the scraps that W. has just tossed on the floor; 2) the multiple uses of the steep stairs in W.’s home; 3) W.’s son leaving for war, with the long shot of the train moving into the distance and all the people waving flags and cheering “Banzai!”; 4) the absolute mass of dancing humanity underneath the clownishly dressed musicians and their trombones; 5) the subtle elegance of the barmaid in the (second?) bar, when she is reaching for the bottle off the top shelf and holds her sleeve back so as not to inadvertently knock any glasses off the lower shelf; and 6) how the director kept the camera (and us) safely behind a fence, or a counter, or a window glass while, on the other side, W. and his writer-friend are struggling through the mob of good-time girls and guys.

I also enjoyed the welding shop scene, which really brought to light the skillful use of sound in this movie. Watanabe is surrounded by silence while he is walking along the street, dead before his death. We start seeing flashes of light coming from inside a building, and suddenly the living world is full of noise when W. awakens to it, and then we realize that it is a welding shop. It was a little annoying to have to keep turning the volume up and down all the time. I wish the remastering could address that issue, but I have zero knowledge on what can and can’t be done with movie audio.

I also found this to be the first film in which the Japanese men were usually whispering and the women were the harsh or shrill ones. Most other movies that I have watched that portray Japanese have had the exact opposite vocal qualities, where the women are whispering in beautiful little-girl voices and the men are speaking in loud guttural and gruff tones.

The use of the air-raid siren when Watanabe headed out of the office to go inspect the park was a bit much. I understand the symbolism that can be inferred, but there was no narrative context for the siren. However, a skillful juxtaposition was the sound of the dog yelping from a boot in the butt at the end of the first bar scene, followed immediately by the sound of the melodious tinkling of the pachinko balls in the next scene. (Pachinko, “a vending machine of dreams and infatuations.” Ha!)

The music was also used with a modest but pointed touch. When Watanabe and his writer-friend are in the car with the two girls that they picked up from along the way somewhere, I laughed when they started singing “Come on-a My House.” The “Happy Birthday” song was used too much, but it was effective in making me think more closely about what was going on at the moment (W.’s re-birth). And I am still amazed at how W. sang the main song, Life is Brief, without moving his lips!

I also noticed with this movie that even though it was subtitled, I really needed and wanted to hear the voices, to understand the emotional nuances being conveyed, especially and mostly by Shimura/Watanabe.

The direction was also superb, with an unexpected light-heartedness at times, given the heaviness of the story. For example, while Watanabe is in the medical clinic, waiting to be called for his test results, and another patient is explaining to him the symptoms (all of which W. has) of stomach cancer, it is as if they are almost playing musical chairs. And when W. and Odagiri are walking down the street, after W. buys her new stockings, she is almost dancing around him, with a mixture of pleasure and awkwardness at accepting the gift. I also enjoyed the (third?) bar scene where the first girl hanging on the Jerry Lee Lewis-like piano player gets jealous of the second girl, a talented dancer, and pulls the piano stool out from behind “Jerry Lee,” who then falls on his butt but continues right on playing, only missing a beat or two. The choreography of movements in these scenes was playful and clever.

Some of my favorite lines from this movie were from Watanabe’s explanation of his situation to his writer-friend: “But…I can’t die. I’ll just up and die on them. I want to, but…I can’t…die. In other words, I can’t bring myself to die. … Drinking this expensive sake is like paying myself back with poison for the way I lived all these years. In other words, I mean, it feels awful, but it feels good at the same…” The writer-friend tells Watanabe that for the night, he will be his Mephistopheles. (He does not search for men to corrupt [like the Devil] but comes to serve and ultimately collect the souls of those who are already damned. Wikipedia.) I also enjoyed Odagiri’s reprimand of Watanabe: “But you can’t blame it all on your son…not unless he asked you to make a mummy of yourself. Parents are all the same. My mom gives me the same kind of line sometimes. ‘The things I’ve suffered for you.’ And I’m grateful she had me. But it’s not my fault I was born.”

I can say from my own experience that as of 1977, it was still normal procedure in Japan (and especially Okinawa), if you needed to get something accomplished, that you would get passed off from department to department, like the mothers who wanted the park. (They were passed off almost 20 times!) Also, if you were patient and sat in a submissive posture, “losing face” for long enough, like Watanabe did while trying to move the park forward, someone would eventually go ahead and help you with whatever you needed.

Also, “slurping noodles” is a gross understatement.

The English songs, the stockings, the restaurant-row thugs made up to look so Americanized Mafioso — those things all made me actually sad, to see Western influence creeping into Eastern culture. But I loved seeing that the Eastern sake drunkenness that takes over at the wake is just the same as any other [fill in the blank] drunkenness anywhere else in the world.

It was very sad to see that the bureaucrats went right back to s.n.a.f.u., even the one who really got the message. Seeing him cave was for me the most depressing moment of the movie. I was also touched by realizing how people can live together, eat together, and sleep in the same house together and still not know anything about each other. It makes me want to pay closer attention to the world around me and those who inhabit it.

This was a wonderful film, and I am looking forward to watching the other Kurosawa films in the Janus Challenge.

I knew I was missing something and ended up watching all but one of Kurosawa’s films in very short order after that.

Ikiru opened me up to Asian cinema. I had watched some martial arts flicks, but really?

I devoured these films. A friend at work gave me a hard time about my obsession as I was using three different library systems and Scarecrow to be able to see them all. And God Bless IMDB…

Takashi Shimura is my favorite actor of his generation. I love Mifune, but to me Shimura was even better. His performance here is flawless.

I don’t want to repeat too much so I will mostly point out here that what Jason has written is so spot on that I simply nodded in agreement while reading it.

The one thing I do want to discuss is that I really feel that Ikiru was a film with two purposes. The literal interpretation of the film as about the value of human life was clearly something that Kurosawa wants his viewers to see. But, this movie was made during post-WW2 reconstruction of Japan. I feel that Kurosawa wanted his Japanese audience (let’s face it, a bunch of Americans reviewing his film 57 years later were not the target audience) to get a sense that Kanji was old Japan. He is dying off and faced with letting it happen without change or doing something to make the world better in the future for some children. The message of an older Japanese man taking on the rigid structure that had survived the war to bring forth a fresh start for Japanese children could not have been lost on its contemporary audience.

Brilliant.

This movie altered my movie watching. Once I watched this I went on a Kurosawa binge, leaving only one of his films that I have not yet watched … or been able to find.

More soon.

In the film “The Bucket List” – Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman choose to do all the things on their “bucket list” (all those things you’ve ever wanted to do before you kick the bucket). Octogenarian hijinks ensue! You go grandpa!

“Ikiru” is, THANK THE HEAVENLY LORD ABOVE, nothing like those crappy slap dash, formulaic, Hollywood cookie-cutter, made by committee, pieces of shit.

“Ikiru” starts with our protagonist slaving away in a crappy desk job. Our narrator explains that our protagonist has stomach cancer and he will die…soon…but, heck, he’s already dead anyway. Then we follow the story of how some sweet ladies want a landfill filled in and a park put in. The ladies request gets buffeted around a bureaucratic system like a ball in a pinball machine. No one takes responsibility, everyone pushes the responsibility off.

As to our hero, Watanabe, he’s given up. Blowing his nose on an efficiency report he wrote once, but now takes up space in a drawer. He is, nearly, literally, dead.

We soon learn, through flashbacks, that Watanabe was happy once. Had a wife, a son, a bit of a life. But his wife died when his son was young and he’s had his job for the past 25 to 30 years (just recently passing the 30 year mark).

When he goes to the doctor due to some stomach pains he has a chance run-in with some schmo who describes to Watanabe all the ailments for stomach cancer. By Watanabe’s expressions, we know that these are all ailments that he has. Watanabe KNOWS he has stomach cancer and will die within a year, even though a doctor ignores his questions and just says it’s an ulcer (or something minor).

Realizing he is, in fact, the walking dead…Watanabe runs away from home.

His son and his wife, who live with him, panic. But not in a way that a son and/or daughter-in-law would panic (like: “Where is he? Is he dead?”). No, their concern is their financial wellbeing.

When we find Watanabe, he is in a bar giving out his sleeping pills. He strikes up a friendship with another patron and they hit the town. Drinking heavily, dancing, meeting women and in a moment of extreme pathos, singing a song.

Back at the company the other co-workers wonder where he’s gone to. But, in some ways, they don’t care. They only care if it affects their job.

When Watanabe returns home, he can’t bear to tell his son what is wrong with him but he soon hooks up with a former co-worker. A gal young enough to be his grand-daughter. Their friendship is a very sweet one but she can’t deal with the mumbling, sickly, nearly incoherent Watanabe who only wants to live like she lives. To show his appreciation he buys her stockings and wastes a little money on her – only to see his son get all uppity about wasting money and bringing home such a young girl (even the maid is shocked!).

Angry at his son’s inability to see that his father is finally finding some happiness, Watanabe disowns his son to the girl. When she finally says that all she does is build things and that why doesn’t he build something…he goes back to work.

Remember the park from Act one? Watanabe decides that he’s going to make that park.

***LETS CUT HERE FOR A MOMENT TO A HOLLYWOOD FILM: Watanabe shows up at the work site. He takes a shovel and starts working. The frail, sickly man digs and works until his shovel breaks. He then uses his hands. When his hands get arthritis, he uses his elbows. The small town sees his dedication and they rally around him, kids, elders, stray animals all pitch in and the park becomes this beautiful piece of work, stunning to behold. The park is named after Watanabe, a statue is erected, the young girl realizes how much she loves the old guy and returns to him. The son forgives him and everyone hugs in the end.***

But in this film? You go from Watanabe swearing to make the park to the next scene and the narrator saying: “Five months later our protagonist has died.”

LOUD ALBUM SCRATCHING. What? What the…? Uh?

Now, this film is 2 hours and 23 minutes and I check the time and I’m thinking…there’s still 50 minutes to go here and we’re at the wake? Did I miss something? Where’s the making the park? Where’s the dirt? Where’s the collapsing in the summer heat? Where’s the reconciliation? Where the HELL is Hollywood?

And then I quickly thank God, again, that Hollywood is not to be found here…

What follows is a wake filled with all the bureaucrats from the opening scenes. The DEPUTY MAYOR is there for Gosh Sakes! All the important people are there and they are burning incense and drinking sake. When the Deputy Mayor is called out to a quick press conference, he is told that the word on the street is that he’s a failure. That Watanabe built that park, that there was no mention of him in the speech, that the Deputy Mayor was POLITICKING and Watanabe was all but forgotten.

Rebuffed by this, the Deputy Mayor takes his place of honor at the Wake and then starts quickly making excuses upon which everyone else starts to chime in. Scoffing at the very IDEA that Watanabe built this park. Within moments everyone is making excuses, everyone is taking the glory, everyone is patting themselves on the back. Until…

A group of women come in. Sobbing, praying, heart-broken, they cry and burn incense. It suddenly becomes very real for everyone there that, indeed, Watanabe built the park.

After the women leave, the Deputy Mayor and his close associates leave the rest of the bureaucrats to continue the wake. Then, as the sake starts to flow, the stories come out and we are witness to flashbacks of Watanabe going to every department and being a total pain in the ass to get the park built. His persistence, his drive, his dogged determination as he fights to build that one thing that would give meaning to his life.

The drinks and stories flow, and though they don’t want to admit it, they all realize that they’re just a dead as Watanabe was…

During this re-awakening, a police officer shows up with Watanabe’s hat (a white stylish hat purchased while drinking/dancing/carousing). It was found in the park. The Officer feels guilt for not taking in the assumed drunken vagrant but, as he puts it: “While he was swinging, he looked soooo happy.”

Kurosawa (the director) cuts to a wonderful scene of Watanabe singing in the snow while swinging in the park he pushed to have built.

After the police officer leaves, the son admits that he found his father’s check book and note under the stairs. The father DID know he was going to die (as this was a bit of the conversation at the wake) and he left his money to his son and his wife.

When the sake has flowed through a couple more rounds, the assembled men are determined to change their lives. Be MORE like Watanabe. Not get caught up in all the bullshit and actually accomplish something.

The last scene, when they have a moment to do what Watanabe did, and then do not do it…is very heart-breaking but solidly true to life.

What I liked:

Oh my God, where do I start? This film is WONDERFUL. Magical. Special. Even writing this stupid little review I’m tearing up again. The main character is fantastic. Everything about this film is just spot on. The subtext, the story, the acting…I could go on and on and on.

What I didn’t like:

I would have liked some closure to the relationship between Watanabe and the young girl. I would have liked her to come to the wake and talk about him but, golly, that would have been SOOOOO Hollywood. Plus, she knew far more than anyone else did about his condition.

But that is the most minor of issues…I wonder why I brought it up.

Bottom line:

A life changing, life affirming, beautiful piece of art. Buy it. Watch it.