Movie evaluation - Ikiru

Ikiru, translated "To Live", is the masterpiece of the great Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. It is categorically rotate from the Samurai films for which he is most well-known in the West, but it is undoubtedly one of the greatest films ever full of life to celluloid.

Produced in 1952, Ikiru tells the bill of Kanji Watanabe (Takeshi Shimura), a civil servant who, as the film begins, discovers that he has belly cancer, and and no-one else 6 months to live. His activity has been defined by his job, one of soul-sucking monotony and inefficient bureaucracy. Kurosawa demonstrates just how ineffective this bureaucracy is by an amusing scene forward in the film, where a activity of women petition the department of public affairs to clean going on a stagnant pool in their neighborhood. They are shunted from public affairs to engineering, and subsequently supplementary happening the bureaucracy, until, eventually, they stop in the works help where they began, having adept nothing.

The plight of these women in many ways parallels the activity of Mr. Watanabe, who has dedicated himself thoroughly to the bureaucracy. Indeed, he has not missed a single daylight of law in approximately 30 years, and yet, he realizes, he too has skilled nothing. Watanabes son is ungrateful of the sacrifices his father has made, even though the film points out that the son never asked for them. Mr. Watanabes cartoon is blank and sad, and it is single-handedly through the broadcast that he is dying, that he is dexterous to in point of fact breathing for the first time.

He goes out for a night upon the town, bearing in mind the put up to of a impatient stranger who is comfortable to back him learn to spend his money. A teen girl co-worker, who needs his seal as a result that she can resign, unknowingly helps him continue his journey. Watanabe admires her zest for simulation just looking at her "warms him up" - and he desires more than everything to comprehend how to live as she does before he dies.

Takeshi Shimura, a long become old Kurosawa collaborator provides a nuanced and upsetting perform as Watanabe, far-off removed from his most famous role as Kambei, in Seven Samurai. Indeed, Shimura is practiced to effectively conveying not lonesome the characters monster pain, but along with his emotional pain, and Mr. Watanabes transition from broken despair to a hopeful desirability of mean is very believable and engrossing.

As one would expect from a master filmmaker such as Kurosawa, the film is endearingly shot, and the storytelling is impeccable as the director deftly uses a series of flashbacks to say his story. The pace is unconditionally deliberate and ponderous, but never boring.

Akira Kurosawa is totally one of the great directors in the records of cinema, and he made many more films throughout his career. Many of those films were great in themselves, but Ikiru, taking into account its moving and poignant story, and gifted storytelling, is truly his masterpiece.