TO LIVE (1952)

A.K.A.: Ikiru

Country: Japan

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Takashi Shimura / Shin’ichi Himori / Yunosuke Ito

Plot

Stricken with stomach cancer, an old man regrets having spent the last three decades behind a desk and looks to find a purpose for his life in his final days.

What I Liked

*spoiler alert*

Enriched by the enthrallingly expressive face of lead Takashi Shimura, “To Live” returns inspiration and meaning to the old cliché that “it’s never too late.”  Shimura’s Mr. Watanabe is frighteningly pitiful and, more frighteningly, easy to empathize with.  Watanabe has closed himself off so thoroughly from the passions and beauty of life that his co-workers call him “The Mummy,” but Shimura does a fantastic job of embodying that description while defying cliché.  His shuffling gait, decrepit movements, and suffocated voice are in no way monstrous, but familiarly human.  Through Shimura, Watanabe is not a creature entirely devoid of soul, but a man on a quest to recover a long lost soul. 

In some ways he is less Mummy, than he is Odysseus.  Like the epic hero on his quest to find his way back home, Watanabe’s journey brings him through a series of mistakes, lessons, dark places, misfortunes, discoveries, and defeats.  His refusal to give up the journey and, once he discovers the true path, his conquering of every obstacle is inspiring.  It’s a simple story with a simple meaning, but one that has more to tell us than countless more complex tales.  “To Live” is a universal story that could have taken place in any era and any place, but it’s setting in post-War Japan does seem to have a special importance.  As Watanabe searches for a way back to living, director Akira Kurosawa places around him the gaudy sights and sounds of Japan’s quickly Americanizing society.  The image of the lonely old man in decades-old clothes hobbling against a background of shiny lights, drunken celebrants, and pretty young Japanese girls singing Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” might be Kurosawa’s lament for what his people were losing in a rat race pursuit of money, convenience, and escapism.  That Watanabe is also seduced by this world but finds no joy there provides one of the film’s most haunting moments, when he sorrowfully sings an decades-old song to some befuddled young late-night revelers.

Though Watanabe’s journey ends with a personal satisfaction, Kurosawa in no way gives us a traditional happy ending, but rather one much more touching and thought-provoking.  After his death, the great message to be found in Watanabe’s success is thoroughly lost upon those he has left behind, who are too either too concerned with self-aggrandizement or too frightened by the lessons to be found in Watanabe’s quest to make any changes in their own lives.  Thus Kurosawa gives us a final scene that is hard to stomach as a parting warning to examine our own choices in life.

What I Disliked

Few movies are as flawless as “To Live.”

Most Memorable Scene: “I can’t afford to hate people.  I don’t have that kind of time.”  A mantra everyone should take up.

My Rating: 5 out of 5