So after a couple of heavy movies on the S&S list, I looked at the giant tie at #157, and picked one that sounded light and fun. It’s an Akira Kurosawa movie, I’m sure there’ll be some samurais, let’s go.

So we get the credits, and then… we see a bureaucrat sitting at his desk, and a narrator tells us that his life is dull and barely worth living, and oh btw, he’s got stomach cancer. We then proceed to get a montage of the bureaucratic run-around, as mothers who want a pond of sewage to be cleaned up and turned into a park get shunted from one department to another by do-nothing bureaucrats.

I, uh, may not have picked out exactly what I thought I had.

And so yeah, turns out that this is actually a look at this man when he’s told[1] that he has only months to live, and what he does with his hitherto-wasted life.

And so obviously when you think about “what would you do if you only had months to live,” there are a bunch of things that come to mind. The movie does indeed touch on most of them — but doesn’t end up at all where you’d expect it to. Or at least not where I’d expect it to.

So like, the very first thing he does is go home, where he encounters his adult son (his wife is long dead). This triggers a flood of memories, of cheering for his kid at baseball games and the like. So is this parental flashback going to be the thing that provides him with the inner peace to accept this diagnosis? Nope, because turns out his kid grew up to be a selfish little asshole, who more or less blows off his dad’s obvious distress to hit him up for money (and was complaining about the old man with his wife when they thought he couldn’t hear).

Okay, so fuck family, it’s time for a night of debauchery. He goes out to a bar and drinks (though his stomach can barely tolerate it); meeting up with a degenerate, he gets a tour of the netherworld — he gambles, he goes to a dance hall, he sees a stripper. But of course, this night of dissolution doesn’t bring him any joy, and he turns out to be (understandably) a maudlin drunk. At one point, he requests a sorrowful song from a pianist at a bar, sings the tragic lyrics in dirgelike style, and basically just totally harshes the vibe for everyone in the room. He ends the night by throwing up in an alleyway.

Well, the next day, one of his young female employees — who we earlier saw not fitting in to the soul-numbing ethos of the office — comes to his house to get him to stamp her termination of employment papers (as he’s been out of the office sick for a while now, and nobody else in the office will do it — bureaucratic to their very core). And in her vivaciousness, he finds what he feels he’s been missing, and he keeps asking her to go out to lunch and the like.

Despite what others around him assume, this isn’t an affair, there’s nothing romantic in this. At first, the young woman is happy to hang out with him, but after a while, she’s annoyed that this old man is clinging to her like an energy vampire, and tells him to knock it off. At this point, he tearfully confesses his diagnosis to her, and asks how she is so happy all the time, and her answer is that she likes her job… but she notes that obviously that doesn’t apply to him, nobody could like that do-nothing bureaucracy.

But here, he gets a flash of inspiration. He goes back to his desk, pulls out that request to turn that sewage pit into a park, and sets out to make it happen. And we quickly fade to a park with happy little children running around at it… and then his funeral. So, he succeeded, and now we’re going to have this last funeral scene as a denouement.

Or so I thought, very wrongly. In fact we’ve just completed the first half of the movie, and are now entering the second, less interesting, half.

This half of the movie takes place at our protagonist’s wake, where his family and a bunch of his bureaucratic coworkers are. And here we start with the deputy mayor being like “this guy got all the credit for that park, but let’s face it, we all know that he wasn’t really responsible for it, I’m the guy who signed the bill authorizing it.” And everyone nods along sycophantically, and eventually he leaves. And then cue a bunch of “obviously he didn’t really build it himself, it was a team effort, but he did come push me into action when I wasn’t planning on doing anything” from the various assembled bureaucrats, and by the end of it (forty minutes later), they’ve all horrifiedly realized that he was in fact the reason the park was built and that none of them would have done a damn thing if he hadn’t forced them into it.

This triggers a drunken breakdown in which they all sobbingly promise to be better at their jobs, and to act in their day to day like this heroic man did at the end of his days. And then the last scene is, of course, a bureaucrat the very next day going back to his normal obstructionist uselessness. FIN.

So, look, I get why people love this movie, but I think this is a thing where it’s been somewhat ruined for me by all the schlocky “Dead Poets Society” stuff and “Carpe Diem” posters and whatever else. Obviously in 1952, none of that existed; and while Kurosawa was definitely not the first person to make art about the importance of not wasting your life, maybe that market was less saturated back then?

Even with that, though, it’s still a good movie. And the first part of it, as we see the guy figuring out what to do with his last days, still hits today. But the extended wake-and-flashback scene just feels too long for something so familiar; I think I would have liked this better if that had just been a denouement, and not a whole big chunk of the film.

  1. Or rather: Not told, and left to infer from context that when doctors say “it’s a mild ulcer, no need to do anything” that means it’s untreatable cancer. Astonishingly, they don’t budge from the lie even when he begs them for the truth. This is one of those things where I’m not sure if the movie is setting up a situation that would never happen in real life, as many movies do today, or if this is how real life used to be. ↩︎