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Kurosawa's first masterpiece is an epic tale of personal transformation amid a tragic social context. Takashi Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, an ordinary clerk -- a standard-issue government employee -- who learns that he is dying of cancer and has only months to live. The news triggers a desperate search by Watanabe for something that can give meaning to his existence and to his death. Characteristically, Kurosawa suggests that such meaning can only come from helping others. Watanabe uses the last moments of his life to push a park project for slum children through a resistant government bureaucracy. Kurosawa's tragic sensibility gives his work a powerful resonance, lifting it far beyond the sentimentality of terminal-disease movies. He contrasts Watanabe's inspiring example with the inability of virtually everyone else in the film to understand what the old clerk has accomplished. Watanabe's heroism is the real thing; it is beyond the abilities and understanding of the other characters. By comparison, all lead superficial lives. Takashi Shimura gives a masterful, intense performance as Watanabe, and the film presents one of cinema's most radical experiments in narrative structure: it is split into two sections with the main character, Watanabe, dying midway through the story.
-- Stephen Prince
Watch and read an interview with co-scriptwriter Shinobu Hashimoto. |
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