Ikiru

        
The kind of movie anyone can cry unashamedly to. Quiet, thoughtful, and melancholy, 'Ikiru' (translated as "To Live") is an astonishing piece directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Takashi Shimura, who both did an amazing job. It opens with an X-ray of a cancerous stomach, which a voice over tells us belongs to the hero of the story. It then cuts to Mr. Watanabe (our hero) who has worked at a monotonous bureaucratic and pointless job for the last thirty years. He stamps documents, and moves complaints on to other offices. A group of women come in, and their ringleader goes mental when the man at the front desk tries to send her to a different office. We are then treated to an awesome sequence showing their plight, as they had been going from one office to another, the reasoning for the transfers getting increasingly ridiculous.

        

Awe.

This is not the only example of the movie jumping about in time. It feels so fresh that I struggle to believe that it was made so many years ago.

       

There are a number of brilliant scenes. I think I'll tell you about a few. As Mr. Watanabe waits to see a doctor, another talkative patient tells him about how the symptoms of stomach cancer, and Mr. Watanabe is distressed to find that they match his own. As he moves to sit farther away from the talkative man, though, he follows him - grinning and chatting about loose stool. He then tells him exactly what the doctor will say - he won't tell him it's cancer, but say that it is minor, and if he says he needn't diet he has less than a year to live. When Mr. Watanabe goes in to the doctor's office, that's exactly what he is told. He hunches even further over the desk, and asks if he needs to diet. When the doctor tells him no, he whimpers quietly and hunches further still.

Another great one is when he requests 'Life is Short - Fall in Love, Dear Maiden' to be played at a bar, and while the pianist mocks jokes about it being an old 20s song, Mr. Watanabe silences the room and stays the dancing when he starts to sing along. His voice is soft and creaky, and his eyes are full of tears, as the practitioners are forced to consider their own mortality.

Later, as Mr. Watanabe has his big epiphany in the tea room, there is a birthday party going on in the background. As he rushes out of the door and down the stairs, the birthday girl arrives and her guests all rush to the staircase and start singing 'Happy Birthday'. It looks like they are singing to Mr. Watanabe, however, and the viewer may only realise the truth once we see the girl walking up the stairs past Mr. Watanabe. They really are singing to Mr. Watanabe though, as this is the first day of his life - his real life, when he starts living.
  

    

The movie ends rather depressingly, but not before twisting it and creating a touching scene to balance it. As the other officials at Mr. Watanabe's wake (yes, he dies) cry about how awful it must have been for him, they are only really concerned with themselves: they all start vowing to do more good, and to stop merely passing complains on to other offices. We then cut to the near future with the new man in charge of the office, and someone comes to complain. He tells the clerk to send them to some other office, and everybody but one man continues on as normal. He is the audience, and he stands up, his stool falling over and a look of indignation on his face. He silently glares at his boss, and the other clerks look up from their work. The new boss stares back at him, and after a tense moment the clerk slowly collects his stool, averts his gaze, and sits back down. The camera follows him as his head dips beneath his piles of paperwork, nobody learns anything, and I go "awww".

Back to the wake, and a policeman arrives who saw Mr. Watanabe sitting on the park bench on the night of his death (the park he had built). He is distraught because he thinks that if he had only made sure Mr. Watanabe had got home, he would not died of the cold. The other officials don't bother to tell him that Mr. Watanabe died of stomach cancer, not the cold, and continue to whine about doing better in the future. One exclaims "imagine how sad he must have been" to which the policeman replies that he wasn't sad. He had thought him drunk, for he was singing happily and swinging on his swing. We then fade to a shot of Mr. Watanabe sitting on his swing in the dark, with the snow drifting down, no longer hunched over but looking up at the sky and smiling as he sings 'Life is Short - Fall in Love, Dear Maiden'. Nobody ever understood. He didn't care that he wouldn't get credit. He was dying, but he was happy. Queue crying.

An inspiring movie by a great director.

Ikiru: 90.6