Akira Kurosawa (1952)
Kurosawa’s celebrated story of a terminally ill man and how the imminence of death transforms his approach to life. Mr Watanabe (Takashi Yamura), after thirty years as a public servant, holds a senior, stultifying post in the municipal ‘department of public liaison’. When he learns he has stomach cancer and only months to live, Watanabe goes on (unprecedented) sick leave. He tries unsuccessfully, and without revealing his illness, to salvage a relationship with his much-loved, cold-hearted son. He spends a night on the town with a philosophising, down-on-his-luck writer. He cultivates a friendship with Toyo, one of the girls from the office, who’s about to leave for an assembly-line factory job. She naturally grows impatient and uncomfortable with his attentions: in the climactic scene between them, Watanabe tells her that he’s dying and that clinging to her vitality is his only way of turning his mind from (in his words) the engulfing blackness of his mortality. At the end of their meeting, he has the realisation that it’s not too late to do something valuable. He returns to work and devotes his energies to the uphill struggle of reclaiming a piece of waste land for development as a children’s playground.
At this point, the voiceover narration tells us that, five months later, Watanabe was dead. His wake – on the day following his death, in the playground he has brought to fruition – occupies the last hour of the film. It’s a very long hour indeed, even though Kurosawa cuts between the gathering, attended by the deputy mayor, Watanabe’s work colleagues and his son and daughter-in-law, and scenes which describe the protagonist’s quiet and absolute determination to make the playground happen. The grandeur of the life-and-death theme, the luminosity of Yamura’s acting, and the director’s command of his imagery all combine to obscure the fact that much of Ikiru (the infinitive of the verb ‘to live’ in Japanese) is obvious and unimaginative. The satirical treatment of a byzantine bureaucracy seems pretty standard (and not specifically Japanese). The staff draw pedantic, evasive demarcation lines between their different departments (‘parks’ and ‘sewerage’ are also key to the plot) and are sometimes invisible behind mountains of files, which seem to be barricades as much as threatening encroachments. In dramatic terms, the wake sequence functions like an in vino veritas foreshadowing of 12 Angry Men, as more and more members of the group come to acknowledge Watanabe’s efforts for the playground. (The one who insists on this from the start is clear headed in more ways than one: he alone seems to stay off the sake.)
Throughout, Watanabe’s sensitivity and benignity are reinforced by the fact that the various forces opposing or depressing him are crudely negative creations – the selfish son, the weakly rivalrous office colleagues, the gangsters trying to get their hands on the plot of land. The deputy mayor seems to be more subtly developed – or, at least, is subtly and convincingly played, by Nobuo Nakamura. And, as Toyo, Miki Odagiri has a high-spirited, eccentric individuality that wins you over. The weaknesses and strength of the film are epitomised in the closing sequence, as Watanabe rocks gently to death on a playground swing in the snow. It’s predictable that this will be the last we’ll see of him; and when the remorseful policeman who witnessed his death tells the wake that he thought Watanabe was drunk, because he was singing to himself, we know this will mean a reprise of the haunting seize-the-day song that the dying man requested, and sang morosely along with, in an earlier sequence in a club. Yet the image and the singing, when they arrive, do have extraordinary strength and beauty. Ikiru slides away from some of the most difficult aspects of its solemn themes: a shot of happily chattering children in the playground cues the audience to rejoice in the pleasure that Watanabe’s embrace of life has brought about – while ignoring the fact that some of the children will presumably grow up to waste their lives in the Japanese civil and economic system that Kurosawa is elsewhere keen to criticize. More important, the film evades the question of whether the playground has transformed the world inside Watanabe’s head – or whether it’s ultimately provided an escape to a different way of being ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’.
29 July 2008
