Review #696: 'Ikiru' (1952)

As difficult as some Japanese films can be, Akira Kurosawa was always welcomed by Western audiences due to the director's embracing of the cinematic, as opposed to, say, the static, conversation-heavy work of Yasujiro Ozu. Still known primarily for his samurai action films and his film noir homages, Kurosawa's movies were action-packed and grandiose, shot beautifully through a lens that brings to mind the great American westerns or the shadowy mise-en-scene of Orson Welles, making them almost Western in tone. Ikiru, one of Kurosawa's most spiritual and tonally dark films, took a few years to make it across Pacific Ocean, and it's not hard to see why. Although, in my opinion, this is probably Kurosawa's greatest achievement, the subject matter is sobering, it's satire alarming and it's story-telling techniques unconventional.

The film opens with an X-ray of our protagonist, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura). The narrator tells us he has stomach cancer, but he does not yet know this, and so we join him, reluctantly, as he goes about stamping his papers in his stagnating job as a bureaucrat. Quiet and eternally hunched, Watanabe is an introverted man, spending little of what he earns to the frustration of his selfish son. When he learns that he has only about a year to live, Watanabe goes through the familiar stages of acceptance as he drinks, parties, fails to turn up for work, becomes involved with a much younger woman and angers his family. But he soon turns his attention to building a children's playground, a project he has seen passed around by the many pencil-pushers in the various departments within the council he works for, which has frustrated the residents of the decaying area.

It's with this shift of focus that comes the true masterstroke of Ikiru. Up to this point, we have been with Watanabe every step of the way, but suddenly, as the narrator informs us, he's dead. We no longer get the first-person perspective, but the third-person perspective, as various colleagues and political players gather for Watanabe's funeral. The film becomes less a human drama, and more of a social-political statement, as the other dead-eyed civil servant's in his office slowly come to realise the greatness of the man. The deputy mayor is there, claiming Watanabe's work was within the confines of his job and proving the bureaucratic machine works. This, of course, is simple electioneering, but the others reminisce and the truth begins to slowly reveal itself in the final months of Watanabe's life.

A lot of the film relies on the performance of Shimura, a long-time collaborator with Kurosawa. He is utterly magnetic here, remaining a hushed presence and developing his persona into a weapon to ensure his work gets done before he bites the bullet. In a heart-breaking moment, he croaks a quiet song in a packed bar for it to fall silent. The young hipsters slowly move away, while Watanabe's companion, a booze-addled writer, looks emotional. Kurosawa, only 40 at the time, was also making a comment on the post-war social outcasting of the elderly, embodied in the aforementioned bar scene and in Watanabe's success and money-drive son. Ikiru is many things, but it's the humanity of the story that will linger on in your mind after the credits have rolled, and it ends with one of the finest closing shots in history.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Takashi Shimura, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki
Country: Japan

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie