**
DVD Release
Watanabe has been working in the
council for the majority of his working life, without ever making anything of
consequence happen. Upon discovering that he has months to live, he sets about
trying to find a way ‘to live’ properly.
It is a question often pondered
by man: if you were told you would die soon, what would you do? In the case of Ikiru, our protagonist, he decides to
take to the streets with an anonymous novelist, spend time with a young female
colleague and finally to build a child’s playground in a bomb crater. For much
of the film, the camera hovers on the face of Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) as he
stares into the abyss and, indeed, I found myself starring into the abyss
myself as the film goes on and on forever! As the film progresses, Watanabe
becomes more and more incapable of completing sentences and the few words that
he does utter are spoken so inhumanly slowly that, if it weren’t for the
subtitles, you could easily forget what he was replying to at the start of his
speech. In all honesty, the film could have been half the length had he only
spoken normally. Of course, this is to demonstrate his worsening condition and
his increased confusion and distress at how little he has managed to achieve in
his life, but it is so exaggerated that it becomes intolerable. Similarly,
Shimura only has one facial expression which, instead of endearing, is
incredibly irritating – we are being asked to sympathise with this man, and yet
I found this very difficult.
There are some interesting
aspects to the film, like the very dark and scathing conclusion, but the film
plods along at such a slow and inconsequential pace that it is more of a relief
when it finishes than anything else. Maybe I am just a heathen when it comes to
Art Cinema, but I found this film near intolerable.
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