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As we head into the final stretch of 2016, a year that will certainly live in everyone’s memory for a variety of reasons, the holidays seem to carry a bit more weight than usual. Nevertheless, it’s any film lover’s tradition to break out a few seasonal classics to enjoy, giving you a taste of the yuletide spirit or the personal assessment that comes with New Year’s.
You can find plenty of Christmas selections on Filmstruck, not to mention a number of wintertime films to help set the mood. However, there’s one title that might seem a little unlikely as an end-of-the-year viewing choice, but it’s really quite perfect: Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), his fourteenth directorial feature and one of his best-loved films, sandwiched in between his legendary Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), five of whose cast members can be seen here.
Though it features one of the most iconic snow scenes in movie history, this film still doesn’t get trotted out that often this time of year because of the perception that it’s a little too depressing or challenging to face during this transitional time. However, if you set all of your preconceptions aside, it’s actually quite a sweet, perceptive and ultimately life affirming film; it’s “feel good” in the best sense while taking an unflinching view at human mortality. If you haven’t seen the film and are sensitive to spoilers, be aware that it’s impossible to talk about without going into some detail about the ending; however, we already know right off the bat where it’s heading. The surprises lie in what we learn along the way.
Kurosawa was on something of a Russian literature kick when he made this film soon after his adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1951); here he decided on a looser interpretation, using Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as the springboard for a deeply affecting look at finding meaning in life as seen through the eyes of a widowed, mid-level Japanese bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), who learns that his days are numbered due to a cancer diagnosis. With less than a year left to live, he tries to find a purpose and a sense of satisfaction with his existence. It doesn’t lie with his remaining family or his co-workers, whom he keeps ignorant of his condition; instead he eventually finds it in something quite simple and beautiful for which life experience has given him all the necessary tools.
We know from the outset that Watanabe will be gone before the end of the film, but Kurosawa manages to play with time and perception just as skillfully here as he did with Rashomon, albeit in a more subtle way. At first Kurosawa employs a string of beautifully succinct, illuminating flashbacks to establish Watanabe’s life after the passing of his wife and showing his emotional separation from his son, but that really just lays the groundwork for his masterful narrative choices in the final third when we learn what’s happened after Watanabe has shuffled off this mortal coil.
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That leads us to the brilliant, deeply haunting image of our protagonist swinging in the falling snow and singing a pop song (whose meaning only becomes clear here) as his legacy is crystallized before our very eyes. It may not have the boisterous quality of Ebenezer Scrooge flinging open the windows and stampeding through town making amends, but this is every bit as affecting as the resolution of any version of A Christmas Carol. Unlike that Charles Dickens standard, this isn’t about how one damaged man learned to live with the ultimately noble people around him; in fact, most of the other people in this film are so flawed you feel far more sorry for them, including an epilogue that shows how the bureaucratic grind will go on no matter how many epiphanies occur within it.
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Ikiru is a film that many people, yours truly included, tend to come back to at regular intervals, and each time it feels a bit different. I’m sure someone somewhere has taught this as a work of art that constantly transforms, not by anything within its physical makeup but by what it brings to the viewer at different stages of life. You could apply that to a lot of films by Kurosawa (or any of the other great international filmmakers for that matter), but this one’s a special case as it truly feels different each time you decide to pay a visit. Oddly enough, it also seems to be more comforting and wistful each time, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that Kurosawa (reunited here with his regular studio Toho after a brief split) was only 42 years old when this film opened in Japan.
There’s always a melancholy undercurrent to any classic holiday film; with just a slight adjustment to their final scenes, movies like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Apartment (1960), or the many versions of A Christmas Carol could have all been tragedies. The miracle of Ikiru is that it seems like a tragedy in a linear narrative sense, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. It’s a film that perfectly encapsulates that feeling you get at the end of the year, with New Year’s Eve around the corner or the quiet streets of New Year’s Day keeping everyone indoors, as people stop to think about what’s transpired for the past 365 days and what they can do to make the next 365 better for themselves and everyone around them. The New Year’s resolution is the easiest and emptiest way of doing that, of course, which is reflected here in what happens to the co-workers at the end of this film. What it takes instead is an internal course correction, a dedication to plow through whatever is stopping you (red tape, insecurity, or whatever life gremlins are sabotaging each day) and find a way to feel good when you go to sleep at night.
Nathaniel Thompson