Ikiru-(to live) A film by Kurosawa

For the last few days I was just thinking about writing about my other passion- that is Film. I’m an avid movie lover who is always smitten by those all time classic movies , detective, horror, foreign film and even children films and keen on talking about film and film criticism.

In this regard, I can’t help sharing some reviews of my all time favourite films -Ikiru is one of them.

 Ikiru is a 1952 Japanese film co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film examines the struggles of a Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning of life. Kanji Watanabi is a quiet, melancholy man who has spent all his life behind his office desk doing sweet eff-all. Gray and unemotional, he’s less a man than a stolid piece of furniture.When he is diagnosed with stomach cancer he realizes that he has been petty much dead his whole life, and searches desperately for away to live again.

This is Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece- a perfect true story of everybody’s life- how we don’t even realize we have it until we know it will be over in a short while. Watanabi’s quest for self-discovery is one of the greatest from any motion picture ever made. The all-too-true paradox is one to end all paradoxes- that Watanabi is dead, and had been all his life, until he realized he was sick, which is when he began living for the first time.

 This film is about the importance of saying yes- to life, to adventure, to human need. Ikiru, which means “to live,”  The movie sends the protagonist on a journey through Tokyo’s night town to demonstrate that, no, his life as husband, father, worker didn’t make a difference. He might as well never have been born.

Kurosawa makes Watanabe’s conversion, revival, resurrection as inspiring as it is pure. And Shimura, a superb actor, makes his character a plausible saint, who can find poetry in a simple song or sitting on a playground swing.