Review of Ikiru (1952) by Papa C — 20 Mar 2008

I'm sure you've heard this type of story before, a man comes down with some sort of sickness and decides he wants to be a better person, que the inspirational corny music and watch as a director force feeds us our emotion. If you were going into Ikiru with this mind-set like I'm sure many of you have before, you'd be dead wrong. Through such a simple story, Kurosawa was able to create not only one of the finest movies ever made, but one that will stick with you your entire life.

Ikiru is a low-key masterpiece. A film that doesn't shove its messages into your face, but allows you to connect with the main character yourself and understand along with him the terrible plight that has befallen him. In the role of our main character Kanji Watanabe is none other than Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura. He delivers a performance of such power and skill that I would put it up against any performance in any film ever. That's how fantastic Shimura is at conveying his utter desperation and loneliness without forcing us to feel a certain way or not. This is the film that cemented in my mind that it was Takashi Shimura and not Toshiro Mifune that was my favourite of the Kurosawa regulars.

Coupled with the great acting of Shimura, we cannot of course forget the direction of the genius himself, Akira Kurosawa. He crafted a film so genuinely human and honest that he should have not only been given best director for this year, but his film should have been given best picture as well (screw best foreign language film). What's interesting about this film in particular for Kurosawa is the way that he divided it up. He made the first half of the film about Kanji dealing with his life altering illness and coming up with the idea for the playground, and then the second half was about his colleagues and relatives at his wake. Some people may not enjoy the structure of this film, but I feel that it never loses it poignancy and was very necessary in a lot of ways. It really gives you a multi-faceted view of the events of the film instead of just giving you one perspective. Instead of giving us a feel-good happy ending to the film, Kurosawa instead shows us all-too-realistically what we are truly like as human beings on the inside. It's a heartbreaking, powerful film, but it's not unlike what we would truly see in real life.

Of course we come to the main theme of the film, which is of course the importance of every day. Not to waste your life, make every day count. This is one of the films where I think that it could truly change your life. It's such a fantastic film that I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in seriously sitting down and watching it.