145. Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru“ (To Live) (1952): A prescription for curing our ailing souls and living our lives meaningfully.
“Life is so short, dear maiden, so fall in love while your lips are still red And before your passion cools For there will be no tomorrow. . . .Tomorrow will not come again.” --The Gondola Song, written in 1915, sung by the lead character Kanji Watanabe (played by actor Takashi Shimura) T hree films of Akira Kurosawa figure in this critic’s top 100 films of all time : one is Dersu Uzala (1975), another is Red Beard (1965) and the third is Ikiru (1952). There are several reasons why the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear winner Ikiru is sufficiently enchanting to watch again and again. When you view Ikiru , the fact that you are watching a Japanese film slowly recedes into the background and you realize that this is indeed a powerful and universal tale, amazingly knit together by a brilliant screenplay. That it is Japanese becomes inconsequential. It is a tale of an ineffective bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe, who has slogged away in a government office for 30 years pushing...