MUBI

Winner of the 1953 Kinema Junpo award for Best Picture, Akira Kurosawa’s beloved post-war masterpiece examines the social conditions of a Japan still reeling from the war, near the end of the American occupation, through the final days and death of a city bureaucrat who, when he discovers he has six months to live, realizes the waste his life, and job have been the past thirty years. Takashi Shimura gives one of cinema’s most quietly effective and humanist performances as Watanabe, a city section chief who sits at his desk behind a mountain of papers and shuttles complaints from one department to another with a rubber stamp; when he finally realizes that stomach cancer will kill him in six months, he decides to live a little (the title, “To Live”), going on a bender with a drunken novelist, taking a young girl out for fun, reminiscing about the lost innocence of his all but estranged son, and finally, seen in flashbacks after his death, as his equally wasted subordinates try to figure out the man’s passion and reasoning, tirelessly pushing to build a playground for poor slum children. What Kurosawa shows us is a man so dedicated to the everyday ordinariness of his job at city hall that it completely blows his mind when his death sentence confirms his life as meaningless, and as pinned onto the post-war Japanese economy, yet to begin its “economic miracle”, a country with officials complacent in back door deals, black market economics, and letting the proletariat hang out to dry. What’s so glorious about Watanabe’s triumph, and so devastating about his co-workers’ inability to figure it out, is that for maybe a brief moment life was more than what you make of it, and as Shimura swings in the snow, singing a sad love song that earlier in the film was a drunken harbinger of death, in arguably the saddest and most beautiful single scene in all Kurosawa, the war, the struggling economy, and the politics of City Hall, the black market, and the Yakuza, rendered powerless in the face of pure human emotion.