FILM.
IKIRU
1952 | DIRECTED BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Whew... A picture of Watanabe belongs in the dictionary next to the word poignant.
Not because he's dying. Everyone dies. But because of how he's lived.
Kurosawa pulls a sleight of hand in that a movie ostensibly about death really isn't. Not Shinu (to die) but Ikiru (to live).
What do you do when you realize you've sleepwalked through life? In 30 years as a bureaucrat, Watanabe's only pushed around papers and people.
Now he's dying. Now what? I remember reading about a guy who withdrew his life savings with the intent to kill himself once he spent them. After a week-long spree gambling and doing drugs with hookers, he decided life wasn't so bad and stuck around.
Watanabe tries that without the same salutary effect. Instead he croons a seated drunken rendition of "Life is Brief," customarily bent forward with drooped shoulders and downcast eyes — Shimura's physical acting is incredible.
He forms a relationship with a much younger colleague, not out of lust for her body but her lust for life. He wants to feel as alive as she does, asking her how he might before it's too late.
Toyo, who has since left the slog of civil service to work in a toy factory, suggests he might make something. She produces playthings for little kids and feels like she’s friends with every baby in japan.
This is how Watanabe gets the idea to build a park. At the beginning of the movie, he gives a group of poor mothers the runaround when they plead that their kids are getting sick from the mosquito water pooling on the grounds.
Now he's determined to make amends while he still can. And through herculean effort he does. Of course, the functionaries who blocked the project at every turn take all the credit. but Watanabe doesn't mind.
Because he's managed to make his life meaningful at the eleventh hour. By making other people's lives meaningful. Which speaks to the paradox of happiness that's real and lasting: to fulfill yourself you have to move beyond yourself.
And so Watanabe, unacknowledged at the ribbon-cutting, swings serenely as snow falls on the park of his creation, transitioning out of a world he can finally see himself in while reprising "Life is Brief," which has morphed from bitter to bittersweet.