Life Affirming: First Thoughts on "Ikiru"

Earlier I mentioned I had not seen Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru" before but it was always one of the top films I've always wanted to see. So I felt what was holding me up, and since this was my month devoted to Kurosawa and his films, I decided to seek it out. I have now finally viewed the film and although I am hesitant to grant it masterpiece status, seeing how I've only viewed it once, I must say it held me throughout its two hours and twenty-three minutes.

"Ikiru" is translated as "To Live" and is the story of a meek bureaucrat who has worked the same job for thirty years and has nothing to show for it. We learn right away that the man is dying of stomach cancer and is given a very limited time to live. The man is played by Takashi Shimura who was a consistent actor in many of Kurosawa's films, he was usually given top billing along with Toshiro Mifune in many Kurosawa's films, most famously as the samurai leader in "The Seven Samurai". But Kurosawa was able to use Shimura more freely as a character actor than the superstar Mifune and "Ikiru" is probably considered their greatest collaboration.

"Ikiru" is divided into two separate stories which isn't the first time Kurosawa has done this and it wouldn't be his last either. The first part of the film deals with Shimura coming to terms with his dying and trying to figure out how to make the last of his days meaningful. He starts out by going around town and living it up with a bohemian writer he happens to meet in the bar. After a night of that, he meets a girl who worked in the same office as he. She has decided to quit believing that life is too short to work in such a meaningless job. He begins the spend time with the girl and rumours go around that there is a romance between the two, but that is never what he has on his mind. He believes she holds the secret to what he's been searching for. The first part of the film ends with Shimura now deciding to dedicate the rest of his life in building a playground across a piece of wasteland.

Without revealing too much about the second half of the film, I'll just say it steers it into a direction I was unaware of, and it is in this half that Kurosawa creates a more complex story concerning a man's legacy and also depicting a harsh reality of bureaucracy.

"Ikiru" is quite unlike many of Kurosawa's films. He was a filmmaker who usually worked in genre like film noir or historical films, but like I mentioned before those films always seemed to overshadow his modern works which dealt with big ideas but were on a smaller scale. "Ikiru" not only deals with death, but also the fear of dying without anything to show for it. In the end Kurosawa asks if indeed his character achieved what he set out to do, and the question is left rather open to one's own point of view, which shows Kurosawa more as a philosophical filmmaker than he is given credit for.

Japanese cinema has been rather an obsession of mine over the past few years, and there have been many films I've viewed from there that often deal with death, and while one might think that a morbid subject, I never find these films to be depressing, they are always comforting. In an Ozu film, death is depicted more as a thing that is natural and inevitable, when we die, life still goes on, and that's a comfort. With "Ikiru" Kurosawa seems to take a more heroic stance by saying death is a reason to live, which makes this film very life affirming. At the end of the film I felt the same way as I do after watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and that is, it's important to make an impact on the world.