Flashback: Ikiru (1952)
A remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic film about looming mortality and spiritual rebirth prompted me to go back and rewatch the original.
I’m not sure we really needed a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, one of the greatest movies ever made by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, but Living—which stars the always-great Bill Nighy as a British civil servant who finds new purpose in life after learning he has stomach cancer—is about as good a remake as anyone could have hoped for.
Like the original film, which came out in 1952, Living—which is now rolling out in theatres around the world—takes place less than a decade after World War II, but it has a very different vibe from the original film. First, it takes place in Britain and not in Japan, and for all the comparisons that one might make between the emotional repression and ineffectual bureaucracies of both countries, the cultural and historical contexts are still quite different. (Among other things, Britain won the war, even if it was still licking its wounds, while Japan was still under Allied occupation when Kurosawa began making his film.) And second, the new film’s impact is softened somewhat by a general sense of nostalgia, whereas the original film’s critique of Japanese culture was more urgent, more focused on the present day.
The new film—directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus from a script by British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)—also adds a few elements that make it more of a “crowd-pleaser” than the original film. But it’s a remarkably subtle and graceful film in its own right, and it even builds on Kurosawa’s themes in thoughtful ways.
I especially appreciated how it notes that even the small differences we make might not last as long as we’d like… which may be the flip side of telling a story set 70 years in the past. Yes, Living is nostalgic, but it also has a sense of perspective, an awareness that the stamps we put on our worlds may fade over time. Ikiru, set in its own present, is arguably more open-ended than that, and has more freedom to hope that our deeds will echo into the future.
Anyway, I am grateful to Living for inspiring me to rewatch the original film, which I hadn’t seen in years. Afterwards, I dug up some comments on Ikiru that I sent to the now-defunct OnFilm discussion list on February 7, 2003, and I am posting those comments below. They’re very brief—come to think of it, it’s possible this intro is now almost as long as the comments it’s introducing!—but they get to the heart of what I love about the original film.
I also recommend checking out the very informative audio commentary that the late Stephen Prince recorded for the film’s Criterion edition in 2003. Lots of great context there.
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I caught Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru again last night—I had seen it once before, several years ago—and for some reason it kept reminding me of About Schmidt and Jesus of Montreal. Kurosawa’s film has a lot of that bleak end-of-an-underappreciated-office-drone’s-life stuff that About Schmidt has, and it too is very cynical about whether or not people can change their ways, but there is a still, small sense of hope in Kurosawa’s film that ultimately lifts it out of its bleakness.
What I especially like about Ikiru is the way the main character, whose name I forget now, is frequently talked about, rather than depicted directly. There is, of course, the film’s third act, in which the character is dead and we learn what he did with his last five months from the memories shared by his co-workers; but also, at the beginning, the doctors and nurses talk about him after he visits them and learns he has stomach cancer, his co-workers make jokes about him even in his presence, his son and daughter-in-law plan how to spend his money, and even the film’s narrator makes derogatory comments about him, safe in the knowledge that the character cannot hear him. We consistently see the character from the points of view of others, partly because the character has been working on autopilot for so long that it’s difficult to say whether he even has a point of view of his own; it is the discovery that he has cancer which wakes him up, and it’s kinda thrilling, actually, to see him become gradually more assertive, until he finally screws up the courage to tell someone that he’s dying and to ask how he should live his life. The film’s middle section is told more and more from this character’s perspective, until he has that moment of insight—and then we jump ahead to after his death, and he is once again someone that people talk about, only now, ironically, even though he is dead, he is not so powerless.
Getting back to that third act, in which the main character’s boss, family and co-workers talk about him at his wake: that whole sequence reminds me of Kurosawa’s earlier film Rashomon, the way a group of people share their memories and then one character steps in from out of the blue to say what he saw—but instead of confusing us with their contradictions, these testimonies become pieces in a bigger puzzle that holds together and makes sense. And yet we also find ourselves wondering what to make of the example that this character’s life has given us—how are we going to live? Are we going to flatter ourselves or excuse ourselves, the way these characters do? Are we going to make meaningful changes in our lives, the way the main character did? And then, what would a meaningful change be? I think it’s very interesting that the main character’s inspiration is a girl who, when asked what she does with her life, says she works and eats, nothing more; the one thing that stands out about her is that she quit her job in the office so that she could work in a toy factory—to some people, it might look like she has exchanged one crap job for another, but she says she likes her new job because making those funny little wind-up rabbits is like playing with every baby in Japan.
As for the Jesus of Montreal connection, the third act, in which people argue over the meaning of the main character’s life, obviously brings to mind how the meaning of Jesus’ life is something that Christians and others have fought over ever since he left this planet ... and lest anyone think I am imposing something on this film that Kurosawa himself did not intend, note how, at one point fairly early in the film, a man gestures towards the main character and declares, “Ecce Homo. Behold the man!”
Great film. Definitely worth seeing, if any of you haven’t yet.