Posted on November 11, 2012 by James Blake Ewing

SPOILER ALERT: The ending is discussed at length.

From the hedonistic, existential pursuit of pleasure to the creepy, unsettling clinging to any vibrancy that can be found, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) follows a desperate and vicious path to grab one last ounce of life to live. And with each feeble grasp, he only reinforces his grief and despair. Far from being distractions, these glimmers of life only make Kanji more and more desperate.

With only months to live, Kanji’s newfound greed for life awakes him for a twenty year slumber as a bureaucratic government worker into a frenzy to live. In another movie, he might be awaken by love, or find joy in the wild abandonment of a more youthful spirit. He pursues these things but they quickly turn into hollow vanities.

He morosely sings the love song from his youth: “Life is brief, fall in love, maiden, before the tides of passion cools within you, for those of you who know no tomorrow.” The passion of love is but a distant memory, all that seems left is the chill of death.

Of course, before the film ends Kanji finds a new zest for life, one that involves looking outward, beyond his pain and suffering. It is only through helping others that he is able to find any satisfaction in living. It’s in this final movement that Ikiru solidifies itself as a great film. Writer/director Akira Kurosawa could have followed this emotional ascending, the reinvigoration that comes from a newfound purpose in life, but instead he jumps forward in time and examines the aftermath.

Besides avoiding the pitfall of being overly-sentimental or delivering the audience a cheap emotional sucker-punch, structuring the last act as a reflection on Kanji’s final days instead of showing them allows the film to be about more than just the work and resilience of one man, it does not become Kanji’s acts, but his spirit that becomes the focus of Ikiru, the spirit of charity.

For Kanji is not a particularly notable man, he is not extraordinary in any way, but through a reflection on his acts, the film is an examination of the spirit of charity. Here Kanji quits looking for satisfication and fulfillment through the pleasure of self, but through the satisfaction that comes from giving to another, of pouring oneself outward. By shifting attention in the final act to the world beyond Kanji, those who he impacts through this newfound life vision, Kurosawa does true justice to this spirit.

The film goes out of its way to make for a more jarring reflection on events the audience never sees. By denying the audience the build to a traditional emotional climax, Kurosawa reminds us that the importance of the film is not an allegiance to a character, but an examination of an idea, a human idea, of perhaps the greatest idea of what any human can hope to embody: a spirit of giving.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing http://cinemasights.com/?p=11581