Cheap Ikiru - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko) (Akira Kurosawa) Price

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Customer Reviews of Ikiru - Criterion Collection

A life worth living
This movie, more than any other, will make you think about your own life. Has it been a life worth living? Could I and should I be doing more? And, if I had only a few months to live, what would I do? Watanabe, the main character in Ikiru, faces those questions. Like a drowning man, he first grasps for anything within his reach including alcohol, a meaningful relationship with a son who doesn't understand him, and friendship with an energetic young woman from his office. But he soon realizes something more important. His life has been a total waste. He has accomplished nothing. He's going to die without having really lived. But he finally makes a decision to act and do something positive for society. There are many memorable moments in this film, but none more poignant than the two scenes in which Watanabe sings "Life is short, fall in love, dear maiden." Takashi Shimura, who plays the terminally-ill Watanabe, doesn't have much of a voice. But this song will pierce your heart.

What I appreciate most is the way Kurosawa chose to tell Watanabe's story. Rather than presenting events in strict chronological order, Kurosawa uses a series of flashbacks. This allows us to better see how Watanabe's actions inspired, and in some cases, confused the people who knew him. If this movie doesn't move you, then nothing will.

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Couldn't be anything but 5 stars
This is a stately, majestic masterpiece of world cinema. My parents first took me to it at the age of 5 or 6, and a few images stuck with me forever.

Watanabe is a colorless, boring civil servant who has put in his time at the city offices for 35 years ... and then learns he has but a few months to live. (Ikiru means "To Live.") Over the next few weeks he tries everything he can think of to deal with this awful news -- taking out his cash and going on the town, trying to enjoy life with and through a much younger female subordinate, attempting to reconnect with his estranged son....

Takashi Shimura offers one of the great acting performances of all time. It's hard to believe this is the same man who leads "The Seven Samurai" a few years later (never mind his hilarious cameo in the original "Godzilla" as a frightened peasant).

Formally, the film is a fascinating study of plotting and film editing. (What can you say about a movie whose opening shot is a stomach X-ray? See Donald Richie's excellent book _The Films of Akira Kurosawa_ for more in-depth discussion of this film's techniques.)

Be prepared to settle into this story. It's lengthy and not fast paced. If you can do this, you will be hugely rewarded.

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Occasionally quite moving but a bit too sentimental
I don't profess to be an expert on the films of acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, but I will say that, though I haven't seen a great many of his films, I've definitely admired the ones I have seen. Films like RASHOMON, THE SEVEN SAMURAI, and THRONE OF BLOOD show a director that not only has an acute visual sense---I have never seen equalled the unforgettable images of the moving trees and then Toshiro Mifune with all the arrows launched at him at the end of THRONE OF BLOOD---but also a human sensitivity that may be more flamboyant and theatrical in style than his Japanese counterpart Yasujiro Ozu, but is no less impressive. He is a true film artist, to be sure...but, though IKIRU is often called one of Kurosawa's most human film achievements, I personally would not quite put it in the same level as those aforementioned three.

Not that it's not moving. The first half of the film actually made me shed quite a few tears, watching poor Kanji Watanabe first find out he has stomach cancer, and then try to actually have some fun with his life. His attempts to do so are quite touching, even though it does not always work out---esp. with the girl that eventually gets annoyed with him b/c he insists on hanging out with her so much. Finally, he decides to do something noble for the people he works for, and thus we get to the second half of the film: Mr. Watanabe's wake, in which colleagues reminisce about the noble act he accomplished for a town before he died. His act---he steps over bureaucratic lines and gets built a children's park in an area where there was only a dirty pool of water previously---slowly inspires the others to perhaps break out of their bureaucratic mold...and perhaps will inspire you too, in a different way.

I dunno, though...I was inspired but only sometimes moved by this film. For me, I think Kurosawa's penchant for lack of subtlety and heavy-handed sentimentality sometimes mutes its power. Kurosawa, for example, is not content to simply allow us to visually observe how lifeless our hero truly is at the beginning: no, he must give us a voiceover that drums it into our head that "this man has not truly lived." And then there is the scene in the bar in the middle of the film, in which Watanabe sings, with tears coming out of his eyes, a mushy song that expresses his feelings of hopelessness and despair. If nothing else, though, the second half of the film seems to expose this unfortunate tendency---a very long scene, intercut with flashbacks, set in Watanabe's wake in which his fellow workers first try to deny Watanabe's deep heroism, but then eventually resolve to be as noble as he was in his last months of life. It is certainly intriguing structurally, as we see the effects of his death on fellow workers and the townspeople Watanabe helped so greatly. And yet I think, could this scene not have been just as effective as simply an epilogue rather than the focus of the entire second part of the film? I'm sure Kurosawa could have made his point---he is showing how one man's heroism can deeply affect other people---without becoming as repetitious and even preachy as this portion of the film sometimes seemed.

And yet, if IKIRU is a flawed film, at least its flaws always spring from an honest desire to lift up his audience in a way that SEVEN SAMURAI and THRONE OF BLOOD do not even try to do. It may be sentimental, but it is always honestly felt, and perhaps you might be much less resistant to Kurosawa's sentimental excesses than I occasionally was. As Watanabe, Takashi Shimura gives an unforgettable performance (esp. with that hauntingly raspy voice of his); and Kurosawa does create a final moving image of Watanabe swinging on the swing in the new park, singing that same song he sang at the bar, but in a different, perhaps more joyful manner.

That image just goes to show you that Kurosawa was, above all else, a masterly visual artist in his films. If he had relied more on his sense of powerful imagery to make his point, IKIRU might have been a truly great film, instead of one that perhaps tries too hard to be deeply moving. And yet I would be lying if I said that I wasn't affected by the film. Perhaps some of you might not mind the occasional preachiness in this film and will find this a truly transcendant film experience. For me, it almost got there, but not quite. Still, IKIRU is a good film that deserves to be seen for its powerful message, if nothing else. Maybe it will really change your life. Recommended (with some reservations).