Ikiru

There is an incredible humbling power felt whenever filmmakers resolve to explore the end of one’s life, since the looming presence of death impels all to reconsider life and to reevaluate how one’s myopic and self-centered vision might be better spent building toward a more communal ideal. That is, death is the ultimate equalizer, where the powerful realize their weaknesses and transgressions that were used to achieve power, and the attempt to humble oneself becomes paramount in the face of death.

As such, few films leave as indelible a mark upon the viewer as Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), wherein a listless bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), eventually finds spiritual motivation within the discovery of his stomach cancer and impending death. Yet Kurosawa knowingly does not suggest that sweeping displays of remorse and redemption are possible, since Japanese culture has long been accustomed to an internalization of illness and news of one’s own death; rather, Kurosawa focuses on a very minute and miniscule demonstration of individual will over empty bureaucracy: to build a park for the citizens.

In Watanabe’s defiance and subversion of the conventional runaround, we see Kurosawa make his philosophical plea for man to dedicate himself to a communal way of living, but moreover to understand that you are defined by what you do and what you contribute, and these choices that you make, of lack thereof, dictate how others view you. Thus, we understand that because Watanabe’s estrangement with his own son is far too gone, his failure there can only be reconciled by an improvement of the neighborhood space. As a result, a life that was once built around ceremonial, though futile, assembly becomes transformed by a spiritual desire for giving and charity.

At once a film that cinematically critiques the sanitary conditions of postwar times, a plea for human goodness, and an examination of how communities mistakenly appropriate one’s goodness for the sake of their own profit, Ikiru never fails to humble and overwhelm one’s senses.

Ikiru: 10/10