Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/04/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Takashi Shimura in Ikiru

Cast: Takashi Shimura, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito, Bokuzen Hidari, Minosuke Yamada, Kamatari Fujiwara, Makoto Kobori, Nobuo Kaneko, Nobuo Nakamura, Kyoko Seki. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni. Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai. Production design: Takashi Matsuyama. Film editing: Koichi Iwashita. Music: Fumio Hayasaka.

Takashi Shimura, one of the finest actors in Akira Kurosawa's films, often took a back seat to the more flamboyant and handsome Toshiro Mifune, but he gets a chance to shine on his own in Ikiru. It's a story of growing old, a topic more prominent in the films of Yoshijiro Ozu than in Kurosawa's -- at least until Kurosawa began to age. Shimura's Kanji Watanabe is a bureaucrat with a rather greedy and unloving family who learns that he has terminal stomach cancer and decides that he wants to experience life before he dies. Hedonism doesn't work out for him, so he turns to service to others, particularly the people he has seen over the years shoved around by the bureaucracy of which he is a part. It's a somewhat more satiric film than most of Kurosawa's, but also somewhat more didactic. Nevertheless, it's held together by Shimura's fine performance.