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By PAUL BRENNER
Akira Kurosawa's oblique and
affecting classic about an aging bureaucrat dying
of stomach cancer, has been given the usual
sublime treatment on a two-disc edition from The
Criterion Collection.
Kurosawa charts the last days of paper-pusher
Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura in a great
emotional performance) in terse and unsentimental
terms. Where Disease-Of-The-Week melodramas would
have their doomed protagonists talk about their
diseases as if the entire animal kingdom were
magnetically drawn to their cancer cells,
Kurosawa, after opening the film with an x-ray of
Watanabe's stomach, takes the disease as a given
and proceeds to focus on other concerns -- what it
means to be alive and what kind of legacy we will
leave behind when we die. For Kurosawa, being
alive means being able to do meaningful work and
making a mark. The tragedy of Watanabe and his
fellow office workers is that their jobs are
deadening and nothing is accomplished -- they are
already dead. But Watanabe manages to find this
out about himself before it is too late and with
passive aggression does something to instill
meaning into his dying hours.
Stanley Kubrick awarded Spielberg's "Schindler's
List" a backhanded compliment by calling the film
a success story because it wasn't concerned with
the six million Jews who were murdered by the
Nazis but with a thousand that survived. In the
same way, "Ikiru" is a success story about death,
since Watanabe, after a period of depression
building towards his enlightenment, determines to
use his bureaucratic expertise to push through a
plan for a children's park that has become lost in
red tape. And Kurosawa, midway through the film,
after Watanabe realizes that he can use his job to
affect change, abruptly cuts to Watanabe's wake,
where his co-workers, proceeding to get more and
more drunk, reveal to themselves the quiet
desperation of their existence. After the wake,
the workers are back at the office, mired in
paperwork, signing and stamping documents like
robots passing on responsibility, learning nothing
from Watanabe's actions. Life as death goes on,
but Kurosawa points the way to a better reality.
For Watanabe, his death is a happy ending. For his
co-workers, his death is a tragedy.
The supplements, spread over the two discs,
include commentary by Stephen Prince (author of
"The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira
Kurosawa"), the feature length documentary "A
Message From Akira Kurosawa: For Beautiful
Movies," a segment from the series "Akira
Kurosawa: It's Wonderful to Create" on "Ikiru,"
and the original theatrical trailer. The film is
subtitled in English. |
