Ikiru
review by Ron Reed | posted 1/01/1952
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Akira Kurosawa's epic Samurai films are among the greatest movies ever made. But it is a quiet, intimate story about a very different sort of hero—a mid-level bureaucrat confronted with the futility of his own life—which may be the director's masterpiece. Certainly it is one of his most spiritual films.
Ikiru, recently released on DVD, is the story of Mr. Watanabe, the paper-shifting Section Chief of the municipal Public Affairs Department. For decades he has hoarded his money, his time and his affections until, with only months left to live, he discovers he no longer knows how to spend them. Played with wrenching vulnerability by Takashi Shimura, this may be the definitive portrait of a man who, examining his life, discovers that it may not be worth living.
The film opens with a stark X-ray image and the unemotional declaration that "This stomach belongs to the protagonist of our story. At this point, our protagonist has no idea he has this cancer." He shifts papers from one pile to another. He cleans his rubber stamp (using the cover page of a efficiency manual he created decades ago, when his job still mattered). He peers over his glasses at a young woman who dares interrupt the decorum of the office by laughing and telling stories. She will not last much longer in this sour, cramped place. But then, neither will Watanabe.
In a gorgeously choreographed sequence unbroken by a single edit, the frame crowded with people moving around a doctor's waiting room, "our protagonist" moves closer and closer to the camera as if to escape a fellow patient and his news that Watanabe's litany of symptoms amounts to a death warrant. Suddenly we cut to a distant perspective: we see this shrunken, frightened man sitting framed in a doorway, hunched and alone as the doctor calls his name. The contrast is stark, breath-taking, heart-breaking.
Henry David Thoreau remarked famously that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things," and the rest of this film is taken up with Watanabe's getting of wisdom, with his efforts to escape the mummified life he has settled for.
Director Kurosawa never called himself a Christian, and much of the spirituality of the film is distinctly Asian, with its themes of honor and shame, its emphasis on family and community over the individual, and its celebration of the ennobling power of "real work." Still, there is also something about Ikiru that is deeply Christian. Kurosawa was steeped in the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, having just completed his screen adaptation of The Idiot—the story of a man who experiences the joy of being alive only when he faces a firing squad. Indeed, the direct inspiration for Ikiru is likely The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy—the other great Christian novelist of nineteenth-century Russia.
Once he learns of his condition, Watanabe spends a night in the company of his "good Mephistopheles," a conscience-stricken novelist who shows him the pleasures of the city. As Watanabe knocks back expensive saki, his guide (looking like a Japanese Tom Waits) proclaims to a skeptical bartender, "Ecce homo—behold this man. This man bears a cross called cancer. He's Christ. If you were diagnosed with cancer, you'd die on the spot. But not this fellow. That's the moment he started living. Right?" It's a sadly ironic moment: this pathetic Christ figure is a lost and desperate little man, drinking his way to an even earlier death.
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