At the 2022 Film Festival in Stockholm, starting on the 9th of November, the film Living has its Swedish premier. I have been looking forward to a chance to see this film. Living is a remake of one of my favorite films, Ikiru from 1952, by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa. Furthermore, this remake has Kazuo Ishiguro as its scriptwriter. I have been following Ishiguro’s work, ever since his debut as a literary writer in 1982 with A Pale View of Hills, all along his awarded novels like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, to his being awarded with the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017.

Living is directed by the South-African Olivier Hermanus and has Bill Nighy in the role of the protagonist of the film. Ikiru’s Mr. Watanabe has now become Mr. Williams, living in London in 1952, the year Ikiru was issued, playing of course in Tokyo. The issuing of Living caused me to go back to its original and revisit Kurosawa’s film, which in my mind is the ultimate film on meaningfulness in life. Ikiru is an existential meditation about the life of Kanji Watanabe, a widower and bureaucrat at Tokyo’s City Hall. A man who is ”acting like doing something while doing nothing”. The cage of his locked-in existence is rattled when he gets to hear that his stomach pains are caused by cancer and that he only has half a year left to live. He tells a stranger whom he meets in a bar: “I just can’t die — I don’t know what I’ve been living for all these years.”

There are moments when the question of the meaningfulness of life gets to us. Kanji Watanabe had been busy all his life with shuffling papers and passing them on into other hands, but when the moment came to examine his life, he realized it fell short of any true meaning. Watanabe had entered into his way of life probably because at that time he felt that it would provide for his family. The days and years passed by. He lost his wife, he got estranged from his son. He kept following his daily working routines, leaving him unengaged and lonely. Watanabe had avoided examining his life until he got to hear the message of his rapidly approaching death.

The realization that his life was empty of meaning shocked him. He looked for new friends and experiences who could show him clues for what he had missed so far. The last half hour of the film shows how he had decided to use the last six months of his life to move from a life that was examined as meaningless to one that brought meaning and contentment.

Ikiru makes clear how important it is to live your life with a sense of significance. The question if our life matters needs an answer. In the case of Watanabe this sense of significance had slipped off his map. Six months before his death, he realized that he couldn’t come up with an answer to the question of what he had been living for. He made a turn-around. He decided that six months were enough time to choose the side of helpless women and help them to make their dream come true. Only then he found a serene peace and the film ends with a poem sung for the second time in the film, this time with a more confident voice:

”life is brief.
fall in love, maidens
before the crimson bloom
fades from your lips
before the tides of passion
cool within you,
for there is no such thing
as tomorrow, after all”  

Ikiru is a film worth to be seen every five years or so, as Roger Ebert used to do. It will make us think and examine our own lives.

November 2022

Rinus Baljeu

Ikiru is available for streaming on numerous sites, including Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. Living will be available for streaming in 2023.

*images posted under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the films 

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