Review of Ikiru (1952) by Nick O — 21 May 2011

Akira Kurosawa is an extremely classical filmmaker in that he's able to see the death in everything. "Ikiru" isn't the exception to disprove that -- it opens blatant enough on an X-ray of a cancer-ridden stomach, as a narrator tells us the scan belongs to our protagonist, civil worker Kanji Watanabe. Kurosawa might also be saying something in how Watanabe the person isn't introduced onscreen until later in the movie. Could it be that there isn't much of a person to appreciate in Watanabe before realizing he has the ailment? And, true, it's the existential man in Kanji we see of the most, himself gripping the fact he has only six months left to live. Doctors choose not to tell him; he's forced to hear the worst from experience by way of his bureaucratic friends.

Okay, maybe "friends" is too strong an assumption in Watanabe's case. He's void of virtually all human activity outside of children Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko) and Kazue (Kyoko Seki), and the public complaints of messengers he passes from department to department. But Kanji is prone to live in his own dogged aftermath, and he'd be the first to show signs of his grief if he didn't spend the rest of his days in that very state. He admits: "I've wasted my life." So? There's still six months. Why not populate the eleventh hour with babe Toyo (Miki Odagiri), the office secretary? She's the only one with a personality as polar opposite to Kanji's to haunt him with further ghosts, and he gives her the whole disturbed treatment, at her side to contrast his pain. Man up, she says. The more time of hers he absorbs, though, the less he weighs her words as they float away.

The last gripe at public affairs comes courtesy of stepford wives claiming the city's water is handing out skin rashes like candy. Watanabe (played by the hypnotizing Takashi Shimura, a staple of director Kurosawa's many fames) takes up their challenge when it lands on his desk. "He's always busy, but never gets anything done," the narration bleeds. It's just part of the new parallel reality hanging off Kanji's language as both his nature and the one over which he no longer has control lead to the same bitter end. Kanji slumps around like he's bearing the world on his back, even when he's basically been granted a free pass out. He's not pitied because he's invisible in the grand picture of space; simply walked past and ignored. It's what life has done to Kanji, and will do to everyone. In the impetuous final scene of "Ikuru", Kurosawa uses his notorious judicial strengths to seduce the city's recreation offices to come at each other's throats, arguing the significance of Kanji's passing and the verdict of the ladies' new septic tank proposition. Because it's the little people who wind their fates. The cycle chugs along. A masterpiece? A masterpiece.