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Ikiru

Posted on December 21, 2021January 2, 2022 by Village Vidiot

“Ikiru,”/“To Live,”  Japanese, subtitled, December 21, 2021 (1952), DVD [Criterion Collection.]  Set in the slowly redeveloping wreckage of post-war Japan, this brilliant and profound black-and-white look at one man confronting meaning and moral dilemmas at the end of his life is one of the finest films I’ve ever seen.  Akira Kurasawa shows us Kanji Watanabe (a superb and expressive Takashi Shimura), a bureaucratic section chief who has spent 30 years as a civil service drudge, stamping applications and simply being there but never showing up.  He has truly lived a life of quiet desperation, exacerbated by the early loss of his wife and his closed-off relationship with his son.  Proper and silent, encased in living death, he earns the nickname “the mummy” from one of his sprightly subordinates.  And then, in a uniquely Japanese way, he learns he has terminal stomach cancer.  With that revelation comes a challenge.  How does one die without ever having lived?  And what would it mean to live?   How should he meet his end?  What will allow him to truly find a way ikiru?  What does it mean to those around him?  Influenced by European existentialism, this film tackles the most important human questions in the most humane of ways as he attempts to figure out the answer.   It left me thinking about these matters in my own life as I enter ‘retirement.’

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