A bureaucrat realizes after thirty years of meaningless paper pushing that he has achieved nothing and now has terminal stomach cancer. I didn't know if I wanted to watch this; just reading that description filled me with dread. Yet it was incredibly rewarding. Not wholly uplifting or unrelentingly gloomy either, it's a nuanced story of a man who is the Man, and then takes on the Man. Living in a city that I often find dysfunctional, the municipal bureaucracy portrayed in Ikiru struck me as completely realistic. City clerks protect their meaningless positions and do nothing of any lasting good for the city's citizens; they have completely lost sight of any sense of public service and occupy themselves with stamping papers, abiding by a maze of regulations or getting out of work by passing the buck. This meaninglessness dawns on them slowly in the film's incredible final scene where a pile of bureaucrats get sake-wacky.
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