From Ikiru to Living

Ikiru

  Think of it as a trilogy. In 1886, Leo Tolstoy  published The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In 1952, the Japanese film giant Akira Kurosawa came out with Ikiru. And just last year, in 2022, South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus teamed up with Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro to come up with an English adaptation of Ikiru. All of these deal with the perennial question of how to find a purpose in life.

It's not actually a trilogy. That would imply the three go together to make a single whole. But they do hang together in that Ishiguro was persuaded to challenge himself by expanding beyond writing novels to writing a screenplay because of his admiration for Kurosawa's masterwork, and Ikiru itself was allegedly inspired by Tolstoy.

I had seen Ikiru a couple times back in the day when I had the sitzfleisch to attend a Kurosawa film festival and watch a dozen or so of his films one after the other in about a week's time. I had forgotten what it was about, probably because in my twenties chasing after the meaning of life was pretty much a bore. Today, in my 80s, and living with a terminal disease, the theme resonates like a carillon in my head. "Is this all there is?" is no longer a trivial question.

Living

Ikiru is a cinema-lover's film, about as far from soap opera or shoot-em-ups as one can get.  How well you take to it depends on how much attention you pay to an actor's facial expression or hunched over body posture, to lighting and shadows, to music, to an acting style that requires a maximum amount of suspension of disbelief. Living is made in the same vein. In both cases the boredom of empty routine is so stark that it threatens to make you want to run out of the theater. It's like watching grass grow in places, driven home with little to no subtlety. Makes you want to criticize the film for the acting and the plot line until it sinks in how well you are being manipulated by talented artists and how much craft is displayed by sound and lighting engineers and a director's eye for framing.

I've been reading a number of critics have at Living. Some say it can't hold a candle to Ikiru, others that it's too English, somehow, missing the point that it's only too English in the same sense that Ikiru is too Japanese, and that's the point. Both filmmakers are social critics. They've exaggerated the stereotype of the way both buttoned-up cultures have succeeded in sucking the life out of their well-intentioned hard-working middle class. Replaced "living" with "going-along to get-along."  "Wake-up," it wants to say to you, in the modern-day expression, "and smell the coffee." 

The purpose of art - to those who believe it has one and is more than art for art's sake - is to rattle the senses. To provoke thought, emotion, to spark a reaction, to get you to focus, to change you in some way. Ikiru and Living are not a total success, at least not with me. I reacted negatively to the endless messaging in Ikiru that one can die without ever being understood, and to watching one of my favorite actors - Bill Nighy in Living - display a man's character virtually drained of meaning. Until, that is, I realized what a good actor (this goes, as well, for Takashi Shimura in Ikiru, in spades) can do with posture and facial expression - or lack of it.

Icing on the cake, for me, was - again, in both cases - the music that reveals the otherwise dead main characters - called a "mummy" in Ikiru, a "zombie" in Living - have a soul after all. They're not dead, it turns out.  Their contribution to life on this planet may be limited and largely unappreciated. But it's there. Look at these two films too casually and you'll see them as dark and depressing. But look closely. They are, in fact, beautifully uplifting.

In Ikiru the song is "The Gondola Song." Here's but one version among many.

In Living it's the Scottish folk song, "The Rowan Tree." Again, one version among many.

photo credits: Ikiru, Living