Ikiru

Judged on structure, and the two movements resist the subtractive test as movements: the first is required so that the viewer holds what the mourners do not, the second so that the deed is seen only as others saw it. Most scenes within them are needed. The petition montage sets the cesspool that becomes the park; the pension talk overheard upstairs sends Watanabe out of his own house; the night with the novelist is the false road, which must be tried and fail before the clockwork rabbit gives the true one; the last morning at the office is the reckoning. What gives is repetition, and it recurs in every part. The night tour, through bars, a strip show and a dance hall, makes one discovery several times; the days with Toyo repeat their unease; and the wake states its turn, each mourner recalling a further episode and growing drunker, more often than the argument needs. The movements are compelled; the length inside them is in places only permitted.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, it holds, and it is double. A life spent in an institution’s routine is not lived, and meaning is found neither in pleasure nor in being loved but made by an act, however small, done for others. And the institution will absorb the act, take its credit and return to routine by the next morning. The film discloses both at once, and the second keeps the first from consolation: the deputy mayor claims the park, the section chiefs argue that Watanabe cannot have known he was dying, so that the deed can be filed as temperament, and the morning after their vow Kimura alone rises at his desk and sits down again. Beneath it lies the family: a widower who gave his life to a son, and a son who is never told. What holds the axis below the top weighs in two places: the son’s side is thin, and the office is satire drawn broad, a type more than a mechanism.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Elevation comes at a few great heights. Watanabe in the swing of the finished park, at night in falling snow, singing “Gondola no Uta” almost under his breath, dying, alone and content, is among the summits of the medium. Earlier he sings the same song at a bar piano, and the room falls still at his face. As he hurries down a restaurant stair with his purpose found, young women at a party above sing “Happy Birthday” to a friend, and the song falls on him as on one born again. The opening X-ray is a cold dread, stated in a flat voice. Frequency sets the figure, and the film’s own design limits it: the night tour is frenzy rather than height, the office is flat by intent, and the long wake rises only where its recollections open. The summits are few, and between them the film keeps low.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Myth built, from two old patterns. The first is Faust’s: a man who has not lived learns he is dying, and a novelist met in a bar offers to guide him through the pleasures of the night city, a Mephistopheles who asks no price; the descent through pachinko parlours, bars and a strip show is an underworld that cannot give life. The second is death and rebirth: the man Toyo has nicknamed “the Mummy” is born again on a staircase to a birthday song, and his one deed is told after his death by witnesses who dispute it, in the shape of a saint’s legend assembled at a wake. The structure bears both; without the night and the wake there is no film. The particular stays particular: a new hat, a pair of stockings, a clockwork rabbit, a cesspool. What holds it near the bar is the building: the Faust pattern is drawn in strokes, and the rebirth is announced by its song rather than built beneath the surface.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the Japanese home drama, the studio melodrama of illness, and Kurosawa’s own humanist films of the late 1940s, Drunken Angel (1948) among them. The departure is in the structure: the hero is removed with much of the film still to run, and his great work is shown only in recollections at his wake, under argument, among men who misread it. The film opens on an X-ray, with a narrator who announces the cancer and speaks of the hero with dry irony. The stake was real: a plain, ageing clerk as the lead of a film of 143 minutes at Toho, and a long, near-static wake where an audience expected a climax. What holds it at the bar is how much was gathered. The witnesses come from Citizen Kane (1941) and from Kurosawa’s own Rashomon (1950), and how much the story owes to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is contested. The use of the device is new; the device is not.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told straight, a dying man who builds a park is a triumph and a weepie. Told in two movements, the second a wake at which the deed is reconstructed by men who were present and did not understand it, it becomes a film about how a meaningful act is seen from outside: doubted, appropriated, honoured in drink and forgotten by morning. The viewer knows what the mourners do not, that he knew, yet sees the building of the park only through their recollections, so the deed is never shown whole. The hinge is a single cut, from Watanabe going out into the rain with the petition to his funeral portrait. The costs are real and weigh: the narrator explains at the start what the images could carry and is then dropped, and the first movement is handled more conventionally than the second, so that the form becomes the instrument of the knowledge fully only when the wake begins.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Seventy-four years of return are evidence. The literature is substantial: Donald Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965), Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000) read it in turn as humanist, as existential and as a postwar argument about the citizen and democratic government, and Buddhist and Christian readings have been made of the same ending. It yields on return: the son, a villain at first sight, looks on later viewings like the father’s own failure; the days with Toyo, innocent at first, carry the old man’s need and her alarm at it; the wake, which seems long, is seen to be the argument. What holds it: the readings converge on one meaning, which the film states, and much of the return is to its feeling rather than to new sense. The ending keeps one question open, whether the deed changed anything, and it is one question, not many.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Released in 1952, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is real: a life lived and then disputed in its absence, and the demonstration that a social film about a city office could carry the weight of tragedy. But it is a synthesis more than a reorganisation. Its witnesses come from Kane and Rashomon, how far its subject comes from Tolstoy is contested, and Kurosawa’s larger turns on the field came either side of it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a stage musical, and, seventy years on, Living (2022), written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Oliver Hermanus, which sent new audiences back to the original. The reach is moral and narrative, a story retold and a figure invoked, more than a grammar others took up; few films changed what they did because of its form, and the film’s fame outruns what it changed.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives complete in its one version. Presence across seventy-four years is continuous: repertory, retrospectives, home video, teaching, and a remake for the cinema seventy years on that sent new audiences back to it. The surface fixed to its moment is the subject itself: a city office of 1952, a postwar night city, a slum’s drainage ditch, aging as history rather than as fashion; the condition, a life lost to routine and faced with death, has not aged. The fabric is the one doubt: the state of the surviving elements is not established here, though any loss would be to the surface and take little of the work. Presence is wide in cinema and narrower than that of Kurosawa’s period films. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: seventy-odd years of its own decades are the whole of what a film can show. A whole form and continuous presence would have carried more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Takashi Shimura’s Watanabe, stooped, voice failing, eyes wide with what he cannot say, carries both movements, the second in absence and recollection. Asakazu Nakai photographs the office as a wall of stacked paper and the night city in glare and smoke; the wake is staged in deep, crowded frames that hold a dozen men as they talk themselves round. The screenplay by Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Oguni builds the two movements to answer each other, and Hayasaka’s score and the found music, the bar piano, the dance band, the birthday song, are placed as events. The costs recur and hold the figure below the summit of the medium: the narrator’s commentary; Shimura’s stare held past its effect in places; the wake’s drunkenness broadly played; and music that underlines in the son’s scenes.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the petition montage, mothers sent from desk to desk in a run of quick cuts played as farce, and the swing in the snow. One law governs both: a man’s time against an institution’s. The farce is the institution’s time, in which nothing is done and nothing ends; the swing is a man’s time, finished. The night tour, the toy factory, the wake and the last morning at the office obey the same law, each measuring what is done against what merely passes, and the range, from satire to elegy, is wide. The law holds across it, but the strain is not slight, and it falls in three places: the narrator’s dry irony at the start is a voice the film later drops; the days with Toyo hover between romance and something else the film does not settle; and the wake’s comedy of drunken officials sits at times outside the grief it frames.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what one clerk’s last months are made to hold. Consciousness, in a man facing his death; the family, in a dead wife, a married son estranged in his father’s house and a pension already spent in thought; labour, in thirty years at one desk and Toyo’s work on a toy factory line; the state, in a city office of sections, a deputy mayor, and the citizens’ petition it passes round; the city, in a postwar night of pachinko, bars and dance halls; crime, in the gangsters who threaten him over the site; death and its rites, in the altar and the wake. They are integrated: the park is where the state, a poor neighbourhood and a dying man meet. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is an altar and a portrait; history, the occupation that ended in the year of release, is felt only as atmosphere; nature is rain, snow and a ditch; and the son and Toyo are seen from outside.

Score: 8.0 / 10