Plot: A bureaucrat tries to find a meaning in his life after he discovers he has terminal cancer.
In the pursuit of filmmaking, it is important to study the old masters in the craft. As Tarantino, Scorsese, Spielburg, Coppola and more would agree - Japanese auteur AKIRA KUROSAWA is one of the most important filmmakers ever to live and breathe film.
There is few filmmakers who have almost their entire feature film body of work (wrote and directed over 22 feature films mind you) as carefully studied by cinephiles around the world. Kurosawa films are beautifully choreographed, varied in subject matter/genre and passionately written to teach those who watch a new perspective on life. To Kurosawa, characters speak their truth and reflect on life and the human condition with conviction and vigor.
IKIRU is the story of Kanji Watanabe, a man who works as part of a failing system of government that repeatedly ignores its people and their well being. Kanji is diagnosed and suddenly realizes his work is for nothing because he has never truly lived and enjoyed his life.
The film uses low angle shots of a bridge while multiple characters reflect on the world below. The bridge may symbolize a path to a new life, one renewed by the ability to stop and see the world in a fresh perspective. The sky is 70 percent of some of these shots, possibly connecting characters to their higher calling, their destiny, God...the stars above. The interplay of nature (sky) with it's uncontrollable temperment may also be indication of a life of unknown outcomes. We must consider the snow, the rain, the sunset as parts of an ever changing universe that does not stop for us or we for it. As Watanabe says something to the effect that he has not stopped to look at the sunset for 30 years and even now...he has no time to as a dying man. Kurosawa, as in STRAY DOG, RASHOMON and others often uses weather and nature as ways of indicating that we as men and women are creatures of nature and our human condition is just as fragile and unpredictable.
