To Live 70 years
On October 9, 1952, Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live (Ikiru 生きる)" was released in Japanese cinemas. The content of the film is inspired by Leo Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". The film "To Live" was not the first work of Kurosawa inspired by Russian literary classics. A year earlier, Akira Kurosawa filmed his favorite novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Idiot", moving its action to Japan.
However, it should be borne in mind that, as noted by the outstanding Soviet and Russian literary critic Elena Katasonova, "In this work, as usual, the director did not seek to literally reproduce the plot and ideas of Tolstoy, but tried in his own way to understand and comprehend the situation described in the story of the Russian classic: what to do to a hopelessly dying person at that moment a small allotted rest of his life?"
Despite the fact that Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live" was inspired by one of the most famous works of Russian literary classics, it was not shown in the Soviet Union.
In 1954, Akira Kurosawa's film To Live was nominated for the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, but lost the award to David Lean's "Hobson's Choice".
But film critics almost unanimously devoted the most laudatory reviews to Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live". The guru of American film criticism, Roger Ebert, gave the film the maximum in his system 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In his review , he noted: "I saw "Ikiru" first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates' statement, "the unexamined life is not worth living."' Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us. "
Another authoritative American film critic James Berardinelli also gave the film "To Live" maximum 4 stars and wrote in the review: "Some have argued that Ikiru is Kurosawa’s most accomplished film and, based on some of the director’s own quotes, he may have agreed. It’s certainly different from any of his other well-known movies and delivers an emotional punch without the manipulation one often expects from movies that address a similar subject matter. Although by no means “unknown,” Ikiru deserves to be recognized on an equal footing with Kurosawa’s other masterpieces."
Even Bosley Crowther noted a number of advantages in Kurosawa's film "To Live": "you see more human nature and more Japanese customs in this film—more emotion, personality and ways of living—than in most of the others that have gone before. Particularly does Takashi Shimura give a deep and exhaustive notion of a man tormented by frustration and the dread of approaching death." True to his nature, Crowther added a fly in the ointment to his generally laudatory review: "As it stands, it is a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond. Then the last third (or forty-five minutes) of it is an odd sort of jumbled epilogue in which the last charitable act of the deceased man is crudely reconstructed in a series of flashbacks that are intercut with the static action of a tedious funeral."
Despite the fact that many decades have passed since the release of Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live", it has high ratings among modern moviegoers. 73% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. And 25% of users, every fourth (!) gave the film the highest score - "ten".
With that said, Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live" was rated 8,270 by FilmGourmand, placing it at number 432nd in the Golden Thousand.
