Ikiru - A Masterpiece by Kurosawa

The opening shot of the film Ikiru is an x-ray of a man named Watanabe's chest. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has gastric cancer, but doesn't know it yet. According to the narrator "He just drifts through life. In fact, he's barely alive." It is then that we first see the face of Watanabe. It is sad and tired. Takashi Shimura played the role in many of Kurosawa pictures that Alec Guiness played in Western cinema. He played the everyman who at once is a very specific character who represents something of all of us.

Watanabe is an old man and a low-level bureaucrat. After he learns that he is dying of cancer, he finds himself in a bar where he informs a stranger that he has money to spend on a "really good time," but he doesn't know how he should spend it.

The stranger takes him to paint the town red. Together, they go to gambling parlors and dance halls and the red light district. Finally, they go to a bar where there is a piano player calling for request. The old man requests "Life is Short. Fall In Love, Dear Maiden."

The piano man begins to play it, and the old man starts to sing. His voice is soft but compelling and the patrons of the bar stop to listen and to reflect upon the shortness of their own lives.

This moment, one of many favorites, comes about half way through Ikiru, Kurosawa's masterpiece. .

Kurosawa is one of the few directors I can think of whose every work I've seen I would describe as a masterpiece. He opens this story with a deliberate slowness and a low-key pacing. By the end, there is a rage and race against death.

Kurosawa doesn't need much to convey a host of emotions. At one point, Watanabe is crying himself to sleep beneath his blanket and the camera pans up to a commendation he has received for 25 years at his post - a job which involves nothing more than shuffling and stamping papers to show that he has handled them.

The word Ikiru translates as "to live" and along the way Watanabe decides that he must accomplish at least one worthwhile thing before he dies. When a group of women come to City Hall and find themselves shuffled and shuttled from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, Watanabe takes over and begins to escort them. He is bound and determined to see a children's park built in the neighborhood of these women.

The movie scenes do not occur in a simple chronological order. They are instead flashbacks that come while we're at his funeral service as friends and relatives are gathered to remember him and to figure out what was happening in his last days when his personality changed so much.

Kurosawa made this film in 1952, but it wasn't released internationally until nearly a decade later because it was thought to be too Japanese. It is not. Its message is universal - the unexamined life is not worth living.

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to see Ikiru six or seven times. Each time, I find it is better. Perhaps it is because I am older and more able to appreciate it. The movie has never failed to move me or to make me think. I recently had the opportunity to introduce a few friends to it, and they were floored.

When I first saw the movie, I thought Watanabe was a pathetic character. As I get older, I know he's not pathetic; he is ordinary.

If you have a chance to see this movie, I would recommend doing so. It will make you think. It will break your heart. It might even change your life if you take its messgae to heart.