Day 18: Film with Great Speeches
“Ecce homo... ‘Behold the man.’ This man bears a cross called cancer.
He’s Christ. If you were diagnosed with cancer, you'd start dying right away.
But not this fellow. That's when he started living.” I confess they’re not
speeches, but almost every line in Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) is so moving and
seemingly unintentionally poetic, making it my choice for this one c: (though
one day I’ll get around to writing about the equally or more brilliant parts of
the film, from the lighting to the clouds and rain and snow and visual feast of
scene blocking and moving cinematography, post-war reconstruction, music,
sigh). Like the protagonist of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,“ deathly
ill hero Kanji Watanabe (played by the sublime Takashi Shimura) sleepwalks
through the first half of the film with numb, wide-eyed despair, devastated at
having lost his years to the drudge of bureaucratic work and desperate to
clutch at any shimmering hope or succour for the time he has left. It is only
when his young friend Toyo says she finds joy knowing the little toy rabbits
she helps make, can make all the babies in Japan happy, but it is only when
you’re in a quiet, tearful mourning in the second half of the film (another
shocking, genius stroke by Kurosawa), do we see the physically worn but galvanised,
inspired Watanabe-San in distant funereal flashbacks, as his friends remember
the first and unexpected time he looks upward and dreamily says, “How
beautiful! Truly beautiful. A sunset. I don't think I’ve really looked at one
in 30 years,” and thank goodness he did, this dying man learning to live Xo
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