More Kurosawa

Fortunately, I have begun to utilize Netflix instant streaming for something more substantial than watching reruns of the Office or bad mid-90s sci-fi (Johnny Mnemonic excluded, of course - review to come). Basically, Netflix feeds me all of the Kurosawa I can digest at the moment, and the latest was "Ikiru", a really nice piece about an elderly bureaucrat (the always-awesome Takashi Shimura) who discovers, after having wasted 25 years of his life in the department of public affairs, that he has stomach cancer and 6 months to live. He swings wildly from depression to benders to taking a young co-worker on dates and all the while his co-workers speculate as to what has gotten into him (he doesn't tell anyone he has cancer - not his co-workers, not his son).

The film makes a really nice turn when Watanabe dies and the last hour of the film alternates between his wake and flashbacks via his co-workers' memories of the last 5 months of his life, when he endeavored tirelessly to have a small playground built on the site of a cesspool in the middle of the city. As in 'High and Low', the question of values and morals looms large, and like in that film, it is difficult to ascertain just how ironic or subversive Kurosawa is trying to be with his story. Watanabe is seen ultimately as rebelling against the bureaucracy, but he does not cast off the shackles and rage against the machine, so to speak; instead, he submits himself fully to the bureaucracy, debasing himself to the various officials, politicians, even 'peons' as one wake-attendee notes - all in the service of creating this little park before he dies. It is an open question as to whether this is to be seen as truly heroic, or as ironically heroic. Is it absurdity that heroism is to consist of successfully navigating bureaucracies? Or is Kurosawa really identifying modern virtue in this manner? This may simply be a cultural divide between Japanses and American culture, but I feel that this kind of sentiment pervades most of Kurosawa's films, even those set in feudal times. A sense of absurdity certainly pervades the wake by its end, once the attendees are noticeably drunk: the younger workers vow to take on the bureaucracy and make it more efficient, doing so with the fervor of revolutionaries and urging one another, "don't forget this feeling!"