Ikiru

Ikiru (1952) is about a civil servant who has sat at the same desk for thirty years learning he has cancer. Watanabe runs a section at the city offices. His job is stamping documents and sending requests on to another department. At the start a group of women ask for a pool of sewage in their neighbourhood to be cleared and made into a park. The request travels from department to department and nobody takes it. Watanabe works out that he has stomach cancer and six months left. The doctor does not tell him and he understands. First he tries to tell his son and cannot. Then he draws out his money and spends a night looking for pleasure and feels nothing. Then he meets a former employee; she has left and works in a toy factory and is happy. He asks her why. Then he remembers the request for the park. The structure breaks in half. At one point he dies and the rest takes place at his wake. His colleagues drink and argue about how the park was built; some want to deny him credit, some remember. We learn what he did from those conversations. Kurosawa chose that structure deliberately: what the man did shows its value only when told through other people's mouths after his death. The scene on the swing is among the best known images in cinema. Takashi Shimura stars. It runs 143 minutes, in black and white. Good for: Kurosawa, films about death, and classic Japanese cinema. Less good for: the pace is very slow and the second half is almost entirely talk.