Ikiru and the Weight of a Rubber Stamp
I came to Ikiru expecting a slow, solemn film about mortality, because that is how it tends to be described. The first act is something else: a dry, almost cruel satire of municipal bureaucracy. A group of women come to the city office to complain about a drainage ditch behind their houses that is making children sick. They are sent from one window to the next, each clerk passing them on, until they are back where they started. Behind the first window sits Takashi Shimura, the section chief, stamping papers he does not read. The narrator tells us flatly that he has been doing this for thirty years and that he is, for all practical purposes, already dead.
Then he goes to the doctor about a stomach pain and the film lets you understand, long before he does, what the diagnosis is. The scene in the waiting room, where another patient cheerfully lists the symptoms that indicate the worst, is one of the most uncomfortable things I have watched in a long time. Shimura hardly moves. His face does the whole thing.
I knew the broad outline and I will not say more about where the story goes after he leaves the hospital. What I can say is that the first act works on you precisely because it is so dull and so petty. You feel the thirty years. Every stamp lands with a small thud on the soundtrack, and by the time he walks out into the street with his hat in his hand, you are desperate for him to do anything at all.
The disc is a good restoration and the subtitles are clear. The film runs well over two hours and I had planned to watch it over two evenings. I did not. It is not easy viewing but it is not grim either; there is a great deal of warmth in it, and a long sequence in bars and dance halls that is noisier and stranger than anything I had expected from a film about an old man’s illness.
I sat for a while after it finished without turning the lamp on. I do not do that often.