The image of Watanabe singing to himself on that moonlit swing set (if you know you know) isn’t so indelible because it inspires you to go “fall in love before the crimson bloom fades from your lips,” but rather because it knows that his message will fade into the light of day and the chaotic bustle that comes with it. They include an assist from the great novelist Kazuo Ishigiruo (whose lean screenplay is suitably repressive, if also faithful to a fault), an evocative historical backdrop courtesy of London County Hall, and a cast punctuated with rising talents like Tom Burke and “Sex Education” star Aimee Lou Wood.Įven more crucially, Hermanus understood that while “Ikiru” might be the most timeless of Kurosawa’s films, that doesn’t mean it was built to last. For starters, he came to the table with a few legitimate aces up his sleeve. It reminds me of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in that way, another gut-punch of a classic that has only been remade as a sad parade of TV movies that all disappeared into oblivion on the same night they were broadcast.Īnd yet, it’s hard to fault “ Living” director Oliver Hermanus (“Moffie”) for hoping that the same bolt of lightning might strike twice halfway around the world and 68 years apart. A simple yet knotted story about a zombie-like Tokyo bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) who finds new purpose to his time on Earth after being diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, “Ikiru” exudes a plaintive emotional power that’s as profound as it is fleeting, and as impossible to replicate as the magic of first snow. Whereas the director’s most frequently cited films tend to be period tales that are rooted in the legible grammar of their respective genres, this contemplative 1952 fable draws from the rich traditions of Russian literature and Hollywood melodrama without feeling like it belongs to either one of them. Kurosawa’s storytelling has always traveled so well that even his least famous movies seem to exert a strong influence on Western cinema in the 21st century (one favorite example: the nuclear paranoia of 1955’s “I Live in Fear” percolating beneath the prepper mania of Jeff Nichols’ “Take Shelter”).Īll of which is to say that it shouldn’t be so uncanny to see Bill Nighy star in a sleepy British remake of Kurosawa’s greatest film, but “ Ikiru” has always been a different beast. If the borderlessness of Kurosawa’s imagination led to accusations that he was “less Japanese” than contemporaries like Ozu and Mizoguchi, the universality of his films ensured that nothing about them got lost in translation. ‘Nimona’ Review: This Shapeshifting Queer Love Story Hates Authoritarianism in All Its FormsĪt a time when nationalism was seen as a moral imperative, Kurosawa forged samurai epics that interpolated John Ford, spun jidaigeki out of William Shakespeare, and smelted desolate Shōwa melodramas from the stuff of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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