Review
Haunting Visions
Gillies MacKinnon on Kurosawa's Ikiru
Sight & Sound, December 1994
I first saw Kurosawa's Ikiru at the Glasgow art school film society, sitting beside my pall Gerry McGowan who cracked loud jokes all the way through a succession of Bergman, Visconti, and Pasolini films. I was just beginning to realise that movies were not only about action but also about stories which can get inside you and alter your way of thinking. I watched Ikiru again last winter during the dead of night, sheltering in a trailer on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia where I was directing Steve Martin's screenplay A Simple Twist of Fate. Outside, the special effects team struggled chaotically to construct a snow scene with gallons of freezing detergent. Inside the trailer, I was once again caught up in Kurosawa's simplicity of storytelling and the film's unselfconscious quality of acting.
Opening with the diffuse image of an x-ray plate, we immediately know that the theme of the film is death. Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura), a senior clerk of the Citizen's Section, has spent thirty heartless years at his desk. The narrator tells us that although he walks around, he is as good as dead. Meanwhile, groups of desperate women, who want to reclaim an area of wasteland to make a children's playground, are shuffled around from department to department in a painfully true comic sequence which includes a pest control clerk idly swatting flies.
Watanabe visits the doctor. In the waiting room a patient foresees that the old man has cancer. Gripped by fear, Watanabe changes his seat and turns his face away from the man towards the camera, creating one of the moment memorable, recurring images - his large, troubled, soulful face staring into space as events unfold around him. Filmmakers often adopt other filmmakers as teachers, and I know that this particular image was on my mind when I was staging scenes around the character John Healy in The Grass Arena.
As the doctors discuss Watanabe's case amongst themselves, one of them asks the central question of the drama - faced with six months to live, what would you do? Watanabe is shown walking alone, stunned. A mute soundtrack makes us feel as if we are inside his head and then, suddenly, the noise of the traffic explodes and the camera pulls out to reveal the street as vehicles wipe through the frame and obscure him. This is one of the more elaborate set-ups in the film. For the most part, Ikiru leaves a dramatic visual impression because the photography complements the acting without upsetting the scene with tricky camera moves - the looks on faces, the postures, the movement of bodies around rooms and streets are images that stay in the mind.
Kurosawa cuts hard into scenes to great effect. In a flashback sequence, Watanabe reviews the losses and failures of his life, ending with him slumping down into a chair - cut to him slumping down in real time in a continuous motion, then cut to an elevator descending, which has the effect of pulling the viewer down to Watanabe's state of mind.
Watanabe is unable to die because he doesn't know what he has been living for. With half his life savings in his pocket, he asks a drinking partner to show him how to have the good time he has never known. So follows a wild, manic night in recently westernised, neon-lit streets as the naïve old man tries hard to live. This includes him buying a white hat which later becomes something of a running gag, prompting various reactions to the 'new' Watanabe. Tumbling from nightclub to nightclub, Watanabe's frenzied mood suddenly changes as he stuns the revellers into silence by singing - from some deep, sorrowful place inside himself - "life is so short, fall in love dear maiden, while your lips are still red for there will be no tomorrow." Ikiru is worth seeing for this scene alone.
In a later sequence he befriends a vivacious young woman and there follows a hazardous shot where she excitedly runs into the street towards two oncoming buses. This is the only moment in the film where I feel separated from the action as suddenly you become aware of the camera operator who must have had his ears clipped by the buses.
Watanabe becomes obsessed with turning the dump into a children's playground. Combining super-human zeal with a show of humility (which makes the term passive-aggressive seems an understatement), he manages to overcome the inertia of county hall petty bureaucracy and to ignore the threats of gangsters. He then dies, and the remainder of the film brilliantly follows events at his funeral. I love the way in which the characters become caught up in powerful emotional responses en masse - for example, the group of mourning women who pour into the room like wailing banshees and the previously cynical colleagues who collapse in a wave of repentance.
I have wondered how the story would be interpreted by Hollywood if it was remade with a first rate actor such as Jack Lemmon or Burt Lancaster. I suspect the complexity of the flashback structure would be the first thing to go. Ikiru is the story of a man trying to experience life in the few months he has left, and finding the answer in the creation of a children's playground. The sentimental pitfalls for any modern version are obvious (although, I suspect an earlier Hollywood movie of, let's say, the 50s might have been closer in spirit to Kurosawa). It's easy to knock Hollywood with its bright-eyed executives generating scrolls of notes, the formulaic plots and its obsession with previews which - with the cold-blooded influence of those who market movies - ask audiences if there is anything that they don't like. Even so, I can't help thinking that this might be one film that could survive a remake, but only if it could be told with the honesty and innocence of the original. The question is have we become too cynical to make this kind of simply-told human story?
