Ikiru (to live) – Movie Review

Poignant!!!

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Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is one of the most heart rendering movies I have ever seen. It’s a wonderful movie where you see the master at the zenith of his craft. This is well illustrated by the fact that this movie is released in 1952 between Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954). In my book these three are the greatest of the master’s works. What is even more endearing about this movie is that this is not as dark and hopeless as the master’s subsequent works near the end of his life.

The first shot of the movie is that of an X-Ray showing of a patient suffering from gastric cancer. The patient’s name is Mr.Watanabe, a government bureaucrat. He is infact the public relations section chief whose actual job is to address the complaints of the common man. But in reality what he does is just glance through piles of paper work and stamp his seal on them to show that he has handled the case. He is someone who has been busy all his life without having done anything fruitful.

When he discovers that he has gastric cancer, he begins to have a new perspective on his life so far. He realizes that he actually wants to live now that his days are numbered. He also begins to see his relationship with his son in a new light. He had spend his whole life living for his son whereas his son has become too self centered to care about his father.

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Watanabe who has never missed a day in office for the last thirty years begins to skip office for days. During one of these days he meets a novelist who takes him on a trip to all the bars, strip clubs and other places of revelry to show Watanabe how to live life to the fullest. Watanabe then meets a young female co-worker who is just fed up with the drudgery and boring work back at the office and wants his seal on her resignation. Watanabe tries to cling on to her and spends as much time as possible with her. He wants to live off her youthfulness and energy.

However she as well as everyone else in his family mistakes his feelings for the girl as an old age infatuation. But when she tells him about her work at a local toy factory and the joy of her work there Watanabe realizes that in order for him to be truly happy he will have to find joy at his workplace itself and do something useful. He takes up the issue of building a park for children over a waste yard.

From then on the story takes place after 5 months where we see how Watanabe, who is dead now, lived the last few days of his life as well as how he managed to get the park built. We get an idea of this through the accounts of his colleagues and friends who had gathered at his house to pay their last respects.

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What I liked the most about this movie is its narrative style. It’s absolutely amazing. In the beginning, the director gives us a sense of the bureaucracy’s inefficiency where a group of women seeking a park to be build over a wasteland (the same park Watanabe helps get built later on) are send to various departments with nobody willing to take the responsibility to help them. All the departments pass the job on to another which is shown by the director shows this with a sequence of fading shots.

Another memorable sequence is when Watanabe looks back at his relationship with his son. Again through a series of fading shots the director shows us how Watanabe comforted his son after his mother’s death, how Watanabe decides not to marry again, how felt while watching his son play a baseball game and how he felt when his son left to join the military.

But they all fade in comparison to the master’s brilliant narrative of how Watanabe triumphed in his ordeal to build the park in the end. Normally in a movie we would have seen the protagonist after undergoing a similar transformation, heroically and sometimes over dramatically going about achieving his goal. But Kurosawa wouldn’t be regarded as a genius today if he had done that. Instead he introduces a revolutionary narrative where he shows to us through other’s perspective of Watanabe how he manages to build the park in the end.

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Till the point of his starting off to build the park, the audience is very much intertwined with Watanabe’s feelings and his desperation for life. We feel every pain, desperation and loneliness of the man who knows that he has only a short while more to live. But after he starts off with his mission, the next thing that is shown to us is a group of people talking about him while paying their last respects to him.

We, the audience, are made to feel detached from the conversation that is going on and are forced to look upon the conversation from Watanabe’s point of view. Since we know more about Watanabe than any of the people assembled there we sometimes feel compelled to correct or contradict the men’s speculation about Watanabe. It’s almost as if the master wants us to feel like Watanabe is looking down on their conversation from the havens.

The acting by Takashi Shimura is top notch. I have seen him in Seven Samurai and his acting in this movie is completely opposite to the vibrant and energetic character that he played in Seven Samurai.

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Kurosawa is a master at making thought provoking movies. In this one he asks us the value of the rat race that we are involved in even today. We are so immersed in our daily routines that we forget to enjoy our precious gift called life. We forget to live while immersed in mundane pursuits. The master does this and at the same time is realistic about it all. This he shows when the Watanabe’s colleagues, even after vowing at his funeral to change their way of working, goes back to their old ineffective ways the very next day. That is the touch of a genius.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)

Seven Samurai

Path breaking in its truest sense

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Seven Samurai is one of the greatest action movies of all time. The great Akira Kurosawa showed the world the infinite possibilities of highlighting emotional conflicts and its intensity in an action film. It also gives us a glimpse of the class divide prevalent in Japan at the time. It simultaneously tugs at your intellect while mesmerizing you with the visuals.

The story starts off with a village being attacked by a gang of bandits. The villagers were fed up with the constant threat of these bandits and want to do something about it. They consult the village elder and he counsels them to hire samurais. Not all are happy with this as they feel the samurais are expensive and would lust for their women. The elder however is firm and advises the villagers to find poor samurais (“Hungry Samurais” in his words) to help them in exchange for nothing more than food and board.

A few of the villagers set off to find these samurais at a nearby town but are initially fruitless in their efforts. But they are able to recruit on kind hearted Ronin called Kambei. He is then able to help them recruit a few more from the Ronins passing through the town. The recruited team includes: Kambei (The first ronin to be recruited and by default the leader of the group), Katsushiro (a young samurai very much impressed with Kambei and wants to be his disciple), Gorobei (Kambei’s deputy), Shichiroji (an old friend of Kambay), Kyuzo (a master swordsman), Heihachi Hayashida (a friendly Samurai whose humor sense helps the group to keep its spirits).

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The seventh member of the team is actually the most complex of them all; Kikuchiyo. He first comes off as an eccentric and maybe even insane. He does not seem to have the finesse of a Samurai. As the story progresses we realize why he is like that. Kikuchiyo is not a Samurai. He was born as the son of a farmer and he aspires to be Samurai in an effort to leave the life of a farmer behind him. He later on proves to be a vital link in the relationship between the farmers and the samurais. The villager do find their hungry samurais, but they are hungry not for food but for honor.

The seven thus formed goes to the village to help the villagers defend against the threat of the bandits. The fragile relationship between the samurais and the villagers, how they manage to overcome their differences for the common good, and their eventual triumph over the bandits forms the rest of the story.

Even though on the face of it Seven Samurai appears to be a simple story of good and evil, it is in fact more complex than it may seem to appear. There are various underlying complex themes that open a window into the societal conflicts and the lifestyle of the people at the time.

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The samurais for instance are shown as ordinary men who happen to possess great skill and resourcefulness. They are however alone in the world for all their skills. The plight of a Ronin (master less samurai) is even more pitiful as he does not have a livelihood until he is employed by another master and have to resort to menial jobs to earn his living. In the end only 3 of the samurais are left alive after the final battle. One of them even has to let go of his love for a young girl from the village because she chooses a life in the village to a life with him, prompting Kambei to say “The winners are those farmers. Not us”. He means that it’s the samurai’s masters who are always the winners. The samurais come out of each battle either alive or dead but never victorious.

The villager’s plight is even more depressing. They are a lot who live their life in constant worry. They worry if it rains as they are afraid if it might rain too much and spoil their crops. They worry if there is no rain as they begin to think that a drought might be imminent. In the movie this is best illustrated when fearing the bandits the villagers go to get the samurais. Then once the samurais arrive the villagers begin to worry if they would take a fancy for their women folks. So they hide them instead. But when Kikuchiyo raises a false alarm they again come running to the samurais along with the women pleading for protection.

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Kikuchiyo is the vital link in making the farmers more understandable to the Samurais. When the samurais are enraged upon discovering a cache of armaments (obviously taken by the farmers from defeated samurais) Kikuchiyo gives one of the movie’s most emotional moments. During his outbursts he says that the farmers are not saints but are conniving foxes. They claim to have nothing but they have everything. He says dig the floors or search the barns and you will find plenty of grains. If they smell a battle they hunt for the defeated. But he turns around asks who made them that way. He accuses the Samurais of oppressing the farmers, destroying their houses and villages, raping their women and plundering their harvest. And if they resist, the samurais would kill them. How else do they expect a farmer to behave?

The movie is also path breaking in some of the styles it has used to tell the story. As Michael Jeck says in his DVD commentary it is one of the first movies to have used the now common tool of recruiting and training sequences for telling a story about a team. This technique can be seen in some of the sports movies even today. Kambei’s introductory scene, where the hero is seen to perform an act of valor unrelated to the main plot of the movie, has also been repeated many times.

The genius of Kurosawa is reflected in the way he tells the story using lights and brilliant camera work. This is ably supported by some of the most brilliant editing that you will ever find in a movie. Long sequences are used so that we never lose out the vitality of the battle sequences. Some of the more intense sequences like the death sequences are shot in slow motion to make it more poignant. His sudden close ups enhances the emotions of the characters and leaves no one in doubt of what the character is going through. His deep shots of the various groups, be it the samurais or the villagers, showcases their unity as well as their division. His cast is also superb led by the vetran Takashi Shimura as Kambei and Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo.

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Seven Samurai is one of those movies which attain perfection and has attained immortality among movie lovers. Even though many have used some of the tools that Kurosawa has used they have not been able to get the audience involved in an action movie as much as Kurosawa was able to. The remake of Seven Samurai, “The Magnificent Seven” was mediocre in comparison. Even our own “Sholay”, a brilliant movie on its own and inspired from The Seven Samurai, falls a few notches below the original. It was truly a path breaking piece of work in all it sense.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)

The Truth about Rashomon

The Truth about Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa’s movies are some of the best works in cinema that I have ever seen. From the first movie that I have seen of him, I realized why people regard him with such reverence. The first movie that I saw was Seven Samurai. One couldn’t help but be awed by that movie when you consider the fact that it was made in 1954. After that I became unwavering fan of his work and saw a few more of his movies. But none of these movies were as great as Rashomon to me. To me it is the crown jewel in the master’s work. In psychology there is even a phenomenon named after it; The Rashomon Effect.

When you watch any of Kurosawa’s movies the phrase that comes to your mind is that it’s far ahead of its time. The greatest quality of all is that his movies retain a kind of freshness even today, so much so that somebody like me, who is generations apart from the time of his greatest movies, is also able to appreciate it so much. That more than anything is the hallmark of a true genius; his legacy is immortal.

Rashomon’s appeal is its plot and its narrative. The story starts off with recounting of a crime and the accounts of the people involved by a woodcutter and a priest to a vagabond commoner. The crime is the murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. The narrative style is that of a flashback within a flashback as the priest and woodcutter retell the testimony of each of the witness to the vagabond.

The testimonies of the witnesses are all self serving and vastly different form one another. The bandit claims to have captured the husband and then tries to rape her. He however claims that she submitted to him of her own wishes rather than him raping her. He also claims that to absolve herself of her subsequent guilt and shame she goaded both men to duel one another. According to the bandit both men proceed to duel each other skillfully and fiercely until he kills the Samurai with his sword. On seeing this, the lady runs away. On questioning about the wife’s expensive dagger, which is missing, he claims to have forgotten completely about it in the confusion.

According to the lady’s version she claims that the bandit captured her husband, raped her and left her there with her husband. Her pleas for forgiveness were returned with nothing more than a cold stare by her husband. After she freed him she tries to give him the dagger and begged him to kill her. She claims to have overcome with stress at this moment and fainted. When she awakes she finds her husband dead with the dagger in his chest implying that she killed him accidentally while falling over unconscious. She even claims to have tried to drown herself later on.

The husband’s tale is told through a medium. He claims that after raping his wife the bandit asked her to join him. The wife agreed and asks the bandit to kill the samurai. Even the bandit is shocked by this and asks the samurai whether or not to kill the woman. At this the wife fled and the bandit freed the man. The samurai then claim that he committed suicide with the dagger. He added on that he had the feeling that someone removed the dagger from his body after he had died.

At this the woodcutter claims that the Samurai must have lied as he was killed by a sword. He then goes on to say that he witnessed the whole affair and begins to tell his version of the tale. He says that the bandit raped the woman and later begged her to marry him. At this point the woman demanded that the men duel each other for her. This enraged the Samurai and he refused to do so and only comply when called a coward by the woman. The woodcutter describes that their fight was more of a comical struggle than anything else. He contradicts the earlier version of the bandit where they had fought with valor and skill. The bandit won the duel, plunging his sword into the chest of the Samurai as he was attempting to scamper away in the bushes. The wife fled on seeing this with the bandit hot on her pursuit.

However on hearing this story the vagabond accuses the woodcutter of having stolen the dagger and hence completely inventing the new story to cover up its existence. The woodcutter’s look of guilt makes us convinced that he might have stolen the dagger.

The priest’s faith in human goodness is shaken by this turn of events and his lamenting is interrupted by the cry of an abandoned child. The woodcutter takes the child from the priest saying that he already has six children and that the addition of one more is not going to make any difference.

The story is a powerful pointer to how perception sometimes clouds the truth. Each of the character tells their own version to justify their actions and to cast them in a better light. It shows the selfishness of men. We are no closer to unraveling the mystery after hearing all the accounts than when we started off.

The bandit’s version cannot be believed because he is a thief and his moral values have already proven to be suspect. Also he wants to show himself as a great warrior when he implies that the Samurai was a great swordsman and he was able to defeat even him.

The wife’s tale shows her guilt when she says that her husband gave her a cold stare after she was raped. Her account cannot be believed because of her desire to defend her virtue and seems more concerned with how others would think of her character.

The Samurai’s tale should have been the truth. But even here we suspect it because it would be far honorable for him to claim that he committed suicide than to admit that he was defeated in a duel by a bandit. Also his account that the bandit did not have any qualm for rape but is averse to murder too defies logic.

When I first saw the movie I was sure the woodcutter’s version is the correct one. But when his thievery was brought to life then his entire narration seemed made up or at least lacking in details. The missing dagger is the critical piece of the entire narrative. If we accept that then the woodcutter’s version is not believable.

Kurosawa does not spoon feed the audience with the answer but rather leaves it to their intellect and understanding. He leaves it to the audience to draw their own conclusion. Remember that this was done in 1950 probably for the first time, and there in lies his genius.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)