OUR NEXT CONTINENT: ASIA
OUR NEXT FILM: IKIRU/TO LIVE
(1952, directed by Akira Kurosawa, written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni)
Click above to watch the trailer for IKIRU
Click above to watch Gareth’s Introduction to IKIRU
How to watch the film: Ikiru is available from Amazon, Youtube, and the Criterion Channel, among other streaming services. Links are below.
Criterion 14 day free trial, thereafter $10.99 a month
Gareth’s reflection essay about IKIRU is posted after the recommendations below.
FOR FURTHER VIEWING
There are 48 countries in Asia, and they have produced some of the most extraordinary films ever made. Here are some more recommendations:
Bangladesh - The Clay Bird
China - Hero, Long Day's Journey into Night
Hong Kong - In the Mood for Love
India - The Apu Trilogy, Monsoon Wedding, the Elements Trilogy (Fire, Water, and Earth), and Samsara
Indonesia - The Act of Killing
Japan - After Life, Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story, Ugetsu Monogatari, Spirited Away, Your Name, The Human Condition
Iran - The Taste of Cherry, The Apple, and A Separation
Israel - The Band’s Visit
Palestine - Paradise Now
Saudi Arabia - Wajdja
Taiwan - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Yi-Yi
Reflections on IKIRU - Gareth Higgins
Wikipedia Synopsis
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for thirty years. His wife is dead and his son and daughter-in-law, who live with him, seem to care mainly about Watanabe's pension and their future inheritance. At work, he's a party to constant bureaucratic inaction. In one case, a group of parents are seemingly endlessly referred to one department after another when they want a cesspool cleared out and replaced by a playground. After learning he has stomach cancer and less than a year to live, Watanabe attempts to come to terms with his impending death. He plans to tell his son about the cancer, but decides against it when his son does not pay attention to him. He then tries to find escape in the pleasures of Tokyo's nightlife, guided by an eccentric novelist whom he has just met. In a nightclub, Watanabe requests a song from the piano player, and sings "Gondola no Uta" with great sadness. His singing greatly affects those watching him. After one night submerged in the nightlife, he realizes this is not the solution.
The following day, Watanabe encounters a young female subordinate, Toyo, who needs his signature on her resignation. He takes comfort in observing her joyous love of life and enthusiasm and tries to spend as much time as possible with her. She eventually becomes suspicious of his intentions and grows weary of him. After convincing her to join him for the last time, he opens up and asks for the secret to her love of life. She says that she does not know, but that she found happiness in her new job making toys, which makes her feel like she is playing with all the children of Japan. Inspired by her, Watanabe realizes that it is not too late for him to do something significant. Like Toyo, he wants to make something, but is unsure what he can do within the city bureaucracy until he remembers the lobbying for a playground. He surprises everyone by returning to work after a long absence, and begins pushing for a playground despite concerns 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, and try to figure out what caused such a dramatic change in his behavior. His transformation from listless bureaucrat to passionate advocate puzzles them. As the co-workers drink, they slowly realize that Watanabe must have known he was dying, even when his son denies this, as he was unaware of his father's condition. They also hear from a witness that in the last few moments in Watanabe's life, he sat on the swing at the park he built. As the snow fell, he sang "Gondola no Uta". The bureaucrats vow to live their lives with the same dedication and passion as he did. But back at work, they lack the courage of their newfound conviction.
Gareth’s Reflections
I was fourteen when I first heard the words Carpe Diem - “seize the day”, spoken by Mr Keating, the inspirational English teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. That film is most remarkable for not just containing, but incarnating, atmosphere - director Peter Weir and writer Tom Schulman induce the feeling of being in a New England private school in the 1950s; the repression, the discipline so finely wrought that it’s easy to believe in the yearning its characters have to escape. And yet there’s a paradox at the heart of the film - for Mr Keating seems to not do for himself what he advocates for others. Most glaringly, he speaks of having a girlfriend in London, and yet he remains at the school far away. No matter how noble the vocation to teach, surely seizing the day would have meant leaving that behind in favor of true love. After all, there are schools in Old England too. However I still love that film, and not just for the atmosphere - for the love of life Keating inspires in his pupils, and the climactic courage they show in standing for something more than just the aesthetic pleasures of poetry, but solidarity with someone being unjustly targeted.
I don’t know if Ikiru was a direct influence on Dead Poets Society, but the Japanese film excavates more deeply the question of what makes a meaningful life; and of how meaning and enjoyment are two sides of a coin. And I don’t know if Akira Kurosawa and his co-writers were aware of the concept of carpe diem, but they seem to have understood that not only is there an inextricable link between the meaning of death and the meaning of life, but also that there’s more than one day to seize. We’ve all heard the adage live each day as if it were your last; and that is certainly a nice poetic idea. However, as the philosopher Roman Krznaric points out in his book entirely dedicated to the concept of, and even entitled Carpe Diem, they’re not necessarily practically effective. I understand the idea of not wanting to waste the time that has been given me, but if I found out now that I was going to die today, I think I might spend too much of the day panicking to get much else done. Far more resonant with the actual circumstances of our lives might be to imagine what we might do if we knew we had six months to live. What would you do with those six months? What would you give up? With whom would you spend your time? What would you no longer tolerate? Whom would you forgive, and whose forgiveness would you seek? What project would you complete? What would you do for, and with, others?
*
The signature moment of Ikiru, the one that they use on the poster, is Mr Watanabe on the swing, having built the playground, not with his own hands, though without his will it would not exist; a beatific smile crossing his lips as he recognizes - and receives - the gift of a life well-lived. It’s the very definition of life-affirming, and although using it as the poster image means that many of us have seen the climax of the movie just by having it advertised to us, I’m glad it’s become such a famous image. Like your favorite stain-glassed window or other spiritual icon, meditating on Mr Watanabe on the swing could be the perfect stimulus to a better day. To a better life.
When my friend Colin told me that his architecture professor believed that the purpose of art was the help us live better, everything I had always believed about the movies instantly clarified itself. The purpose of cinema is to help us live better too. And just as we know that architecture made with the flourishing of humans and the ecosystem is easy to spot, so is life-giving cinema. Ikiru is one of the grandparents - among its descendants are Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, in which people have a week to decide one memory in which they will spend eternity; Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, in which an extended family “spends the inheritance now”, celebrating the magnificence of life rather than worrying about tomorrow; Darren Aronofosky’s The Fountain, in which a dying person knows more about how to truly live while her partner misses the woods for the trees in trying to keep her alive. (And Aronofsky includes a lovely cinematic grace note in the form of an explicit homage to Ikiru - telling the truth of how sometimes an interruption to the flow of every day life can cause our senses to temporarily “switch off”.)
Ikiru is a gift to anyone who has ever felt trapped or disappointed by a bureaucracy; or wondered how to make sense of life in light of the fact that we all know we’re going to die. In the moment we’re all currently facing, we may be thinking more about the frailty of life, but many of us are also thinking about what it would be like to live a life that really mattered. How to help each other. Someone recently sent me an email with the simple question Where are you in the current environment? The email contained a simple chart written by Dr Lance Secretan, with a suggested progression from ““me”(hunkering down, preparing for the worst, and feeling sorry for oneself) to “surviving” (waiting it out until this is over (still about “me”)) to being about “serving” (focusing on the needs of others, loving them, and being a part of the solution).”
Mr Watanabe may be the teacher we need for these times. The face of Takashi Shimura looking down at the mourners could be an icon through which we see a path forward. Kurosawa, through Mr Watanabe, is inviting us into the space where the things we may have believed as children are still true: that life is worth living, but most of all when we do for others what we would want them to do for us; when we love our neighbors as ourselves.
Ikiru begins by being about a man who says “these days I hardly feel alive unless my stomach hurts”; whose life would be boring to describe “because he’s never actually lived”. The opening image is an X-ray of a chest, but it’s really an X-ray of a soul. For Mr Watanabe to truly face what life is asking of him - and offering him - his pain will have to get worse. The pain of pushing a pen for decades, saving money with no idea how to spend it; building a life with no idea how to share it, and only a certificate of achievement to show for it, given by a bureaucracy with no intent of changing. This is, if not the banality of evil, surely the banality of banality.
At first, he lets himself be dragged around by this strange trickster character who appears - a man both shows him a bad way to have a good time (he realizes fairly quickly that hedonism and gambling are not the path to happiness), and says something that could be half the headline for Ikiru itself:
It’s our human duty to enjoy life!
It makes sense that he has to go on this journey this way first - all true hero’s journeys require plunging into the depths before we can emerge, integrating light and shadow. He knows has has been a slave to his life before now; but it’s also true that enjoyment without community, without accountability, is a prison too. As in the old Twilight Zone episode in which a man gets everything his selfishness wants, until the horrified realization that he is in hell, Mr Watanabe awakens to the notion that mere self-orientation is no happiness at all. But partnering with the spirit of love for the sake of the common good? That’s the good life.
He collapses before he can awaken, and then it begins to drip into his consciousness - truly looking at a sunset for the first time in thirty years, understanding that the path forward into the truest experience of his life is to return to the oldest part of him, which is of course also the youngest. Making toys makes you feel like you’re playing with the children of Japan. Making a playground? Well that’s even better. He doesn’t wait - like Kurosawa, who according to superfan Bill Hader didn’t just talk about making a film that would give us more life - he went out there and did it. Even in the face of lethal threats - which, let’s face it, cannot overcome a soul living in the tender acceptance of its own impending transition. And it’s not just the crime bosses of whom he is no longer afraid; three decades in a robotic bureaucracy left him realizing that “reputation” often matters in all the wrong ways. His colleagues truly have no idea who he truly was, and what his witness could do for them. No matter, for Mr Watanabe has realized that recognition is of limited value. The reward really is in the service itself. As he lolls gently on the swing that literally would not exist without him choosing to act, the words of a song from earlier in the film appear on his lips. When first he hears the song in the nightclub, it is an almost accusatory lament. But when you’ve built a playground (or in mythic terms, when you’ve recreated the Garden of Eden) because you want to play, because you want others to have a safe place to play, and because you realize you are here not primarily to suffer, but to enjoy yourself through loving the world, you might change even the past.
*
Mr Watanabe wanted to do something, and even organized crime couldn’t stop him. Once he realized that the purpose of our gifts is to use them to serve the common good, he noticed something else. Hope is something you have to claim for yourself. Just go out there and do it.
*
Gondola no Uta
life is brief.
fall in love, maidens
before the crimson bloom
fades from your lips
before the tides of passion
cool within you,
for there is no such thing
as tomorrow, after all
life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before his hands
take up his boat
before the flush of his cheeks fades
for there is not a person
who comes hither
life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the boat drifts away
on the waves
before the hand resting on your shoulder
becomes frail
for there is no reach here
for the sight of others
life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the raven tresses
begin to fade
before the flame in your hearts
flicker and die
for today, once passed,
is never to come again
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1: What did you notice about the film?
2: What questions arose for you?
3: Did you want something to change about the world, or about yourself?
4: What would you do if you had six months?