A Film Canon

As might be expected of a film that turns on such a potentially sentimental, emotionally manipulative premise - a petty bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) who, upon being told that he has several months to live, searches his life for meaning - Ikiru's genius lies in its nuances, rather than in any more general affirmation of 'life'. Foremost among these is Kurosawa's comic portrait of bureaucracy, which subverts the Japanese ethos of obedience, restraint and resignation by reducing it to a mere formalism, devoid of any deeper philosophical kernel, with the result that the Department of Public Affairs' one attempt to rouse themselves into something approaching genuine ritual exposes a drunken, abject, vulnerable emasculation. Outside of the workplace, Kurosawa draws a poetic analogy between Kenji Watanabe's disoriented wandering, and the increasing disorientation of the cityscapes through which he wanders, which represent a more Westernised Japan than in any other film of the period, weaving a common thread with the drifters and flaneurs of Drunken Angel, The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog. From this perspective, Watanabe's final decision to build a park constitutes a retreat from an increasingly Westernised urban space, in the direction of a more traditionally Japanese meditative environment. It also forms the pretext for the film's most radical formal gesture - eliding Watanabe from the third act (or, alternatively, fusing him with the park), thereby ensuring that the hammy, clownish dimension of Shimura's performance (emphasised by an unusual frequency of close-ups, which transform introspection into a physical feat) is sufficient to temper sentimentality with bathos, but sufficiently curbed to avoid its own potential for kitsch, clownish sentimentality.