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| A scene from Ikiru |
Ikiru (To Live) is a great movie
by Akira Kurosawa, one of the best two Japanese filmmakers of the mid-twentieth
century (the other one is Yasihiro Ozu). Perhaps not as well known as Seven
Samurai or Dersu Uzala, this film has many followers and its argument
lends itself to curious considerations.
The
protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, has been working for 30 years in the bureaucracy
of the City of Tokyo. As the narrator says at the beginning of the film, in
these 30 years he has not lived. Or in the words of Toyo, his young employee, he
has behaved like a mummy. Then he learns that he suffers from stomach cancer
and has less than a year to live. As I mentioned in another
post in this blog, by 1952, the year the movie was released, a cancer
diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence. Watanabe discovers the value of
life and tries to start living.After trying without success to drown his sorrow
in pleasure, he decides to start a crusade for the sanitation of some land and the
building of a playground. Although it costs him a huge effort, because the
bureaucracy makes a tooth and nail resistance, he finally succeeds. The last
fifty minutes of the film are devoted to Watanabe’s funeral, with several
flashbacks showing his fight against the bureaucracy.
