Ikiru

Ikiru (生きる, "To Live") is a 1952 Japanese tragedy film directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni.

The film examines the struggles of a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura) and his final quest for meaning.

The film's major themes include learning how to live, the inefficiency of bureaucracy, and decaying family life in Japan, which have been the subject of analysis by academics and critics.

In one case, a group of parents who simply want permission to drain a cesspool so they can install a playground are endlessly routed to different offices in the same building.

In a nightclub, Watanabe requests a song from the piano player, and sings "Gondola no Uta" (translated as “Life Is Brief” in the English subtitles) with great sadness.

He surprises everyone by returning to work after a long absence, and he begins pushing for a playground despite concerns that he is intruding on the jurisdiction of other departments.

Watanabe dies, and at his wake, his former co-workers gather, after the opening of the playground, to figure out what caused such a dramatic change in his behavior.

As the co-workers drink, they slowly realize Watanabe must have known he was dying, even when his son denies this truth, as he was unaware of his father's condition.

[5] Initially, Watanabe looks to nightclubs and women to live life to the fullest, but winds up singing the 1915 song "Gondola no Uta" as an expression of loss.

[11] Japanese health care is depicted as overly bureaucratic in the film when Watanabe visits a clinic in a "poignant" scene.

[13] Author Timothy Iles writes that, as with Yasujirō Ozu's 1953 film Tokyo Story, Ikiru may hold a negative view about the state of family life in modern Japan.

[15] Another reason is Watanabe's not being with Mitsuo during a medical treatment when the boy was 10, which fits a pattern in Kurosawa's films of sons being overly harsh to their fathers.

[22] Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, called it "a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond," which he deemed "anticlimactic."

Crowther praised Shimura, writing he "measures up through his performance in this picture with the top film actors anywhere," and complimented Miki Odagiri, Nobuo Kaneko and Yunosuke Ito.

The site's consensus reads: "Ikiru is a well-acted and deeply moving humanist tale about a man facing his own mortality, one of legendary director Akira Kurosawa's most intimate films".

[20] Kurosawa believed William Shakespeare's play Macbeth could serve as a cautionary tale complementing Ikiru, thus directing his 1957 film Throne of Blood.

[45] Ikiru was remade as a Japanese television film that debuted on TV Asahi on 9 September 2007, the day after a remake of Kurosawa's High and Low.

[47] In 2003, DreamWorks attempted a U.S. remake, which would star Tom Hanks in the lead role, and it talked to Richard Price about adapting the screenplay.

[50] A British remake titled Living, adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Oliver Hermanus, and starring Bill Nighy, was released in 2022.

Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe in the iconic scene