License to Live (Ningen Gokaku) — movie review
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Koji Yakusho, Kumiko Aso, Sho Aikawa, Shun Sugata, Ren Osuji
Genre: Drama
HE SAID:
License to Live is the tale of a young man trying to discover his place in the world after being lost to a coma for 10 years. Only fourteen when he lost consciousness, Yutaka (Hidetoshi Nishijima) emerges mentally the same as the day he left, a boy in a man’s body. Now a stranger in his own hometown, he finds the world around him has moved on. Everyone from close friends to family has gone their own way, all but forgetting him in the process. With the help of his new guardian, his father’s old college friend (Koji Yakusho), he sets about trying to reconstruct the circumstances of his departure, reassembling family, reconnecting with friends, and even attempting to reconstruct the fun park/dude ranch of his youth in his own front yard. But is restoring the old enough to make it stick?
With License to Live, Kurosawa is very much concerned with the notions of time and purpose, and the consequences that result from interrupting that flow (think the old Bible verse and Byrds song). His hypothesis: things come and go for a reason. Restoring the circumstances and dynamics of the past is near impossible. It is better to accept and move on than to cling forever to lost circumstances, but that act of moving on takes a motivation most people cannot muster. Furthermore, he explores the nature of tragedy, and its effect on those connected to the victim. In the case of the film’s protagonist, his accident scatters his family across the world, having lost the anchor that tied them together in the first place. When the protagonist returns, he finds the connections he took for granted almost impossible to restore, his family having already accepted and internalized his departure from this world. The only one who cares for him shares no biological connection to him, and no desire for family himself. A pleasant substitution, but not quite what’s needed.
In order to keep this short, I’ll wrap it up here. License to Live is a philosophically intriguing, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and deeply emotional tale from Kurosawa. Don’t expect to be spoon fed the film’s philosophy. You’re going to have to work at it. Interpret it. License to Live (Ningen Gokaku) is more cinematic poetry than prose, and wholly worth the time spent experiencing it. Check it out.
Added bonus: Excellent turns by Kumiko Aso and Sho Aikawa. As mentioned in our previous article, Kurosawa says Aikawa’s performance here is most like his personality in real life.
SHE SAID:
A patient wakes up after a 10-year coma. Basically a 14-year-old boy in a 24-year-old frame, Yutaka (Hidetoshi Nishijima) eagerly whips through physical rehab and a world events recap, sprinting back to a house that used to be his home. A house doesn’t have memories, it doesn’t miss you when you leave, yet it manages to sigh and groan when you are away, and even embody a pulse when occupied. In License to Live, deep footsteps on hollow wooden floors are like heartbeats; the house is alive with activity again!
As Yutaka floats from a listless fog to aching cognizance concerning the physical disintegration of his family, his seemingly nonchalant neutrality actually fuels the family’s reunion. By simply waiting for them to appear, Yutaka’s mother (Lily), father (Shun Sugata), and sister (Kumiko Aso) return to the house; returning to him. The family’s recovery rivals the speed of his physical rehabilitation, with emotional reparation ostensibly close behind. Perhaps all it needs is a little more time. Then, in his own naïve impatience, Yutaka obstinately scrambles to reassemble life as it was before his coma, heart set on literally rebuilding (i.e: the family Dude Ranch), in efforts to seamlessly regain the time he lost, and to continue his life. He later realizes (in a melancholic moment wielding a chainsaw) that everything he reconstructed has to be destroyed in order to truly live.
A house, as well as a lifetime, can be filled up with surreptitious “junk”, in this case shoveled in by opportunistic caretaker Fujimori (Koji Yakusho), both a parallel character and quiet catalyst — while Yutaka’s father is on permanent vacation, globetrotting out of grief and self-affirmation, Fujimori uses his pal’s land and abode as a dumping ground and minor fishery — but you can chose to ignore the mess, clear it out, or let it run a life of its own.
The parade of parallel characters clearly illustrates and illuminates this principle, such as Yoriko Doguchi’s optimistic Miki — a girl with dreams of fame in faraway New York, Sho Aikawa’s Kazaki — a packed-with-potential persona who wanders directionless, and Ren Osugi’s Murota — the ordinary man whose car struck Yutaka, sending him into the coma… a man whose caustic inner demons denies forgiveness for himself and his victim. Even tertiary characters, like the dopey guys who routinely “fish” at Fujimori’s “shooting fish in a barrel” indoor pond are inflicted with a blank numbness (likened to the dead fish they catch), thereby commanding and supporting the ultimate moral of License to Live: it’s not the length of your life, but what you do with that short time that’s important. (I promise this conventional theme is given a unique treatment.)
A recurring theme has characters falling into cardboard box/trash piles. In a brief Q&A with License to Live’s writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, he brushes aside any attachment to depth, stating boxes are ubiquitous props soft enough for actors to land in, comical enough to incite laughter. Effective comedy relief, yes, yet for me, it also ties into Fujimori’s cyclical ceaseless strife with garbage removal on a quickly shrinking island (Honshu Japan), while metaphorically referencing the moral.
Another recurring theme is people placed in the wings, in the shadows, perhaps obscured because they were not intended to be part of that particular moment; they weren’t part of Yutaka’s internal scene 10-years ago and shouldn’t be a part of his present day reenactment. For example, when Yutaka watches his father through the window, on the verge of shedding a combination of happy and heartbroken tears, Fujimori stands behind him for a while, neither hiding from nor participating in the moment. The shadows are both obscuring and obtrusive, and are a creation of the light and dark moments (and literally light and darkness) of the house.
Another interesting sequence to note is when Fujimori teaches Yutaka how to drive. Despite his traumatic car accident, Yutaka doesn’t harbor a tinge of motorphobia, and when Fujimori tells the lead-footed youth he isn’t suited for driving, he is perhaps denying him to pursue a license, i.e.: license to live in the traditional manner society subscribes to.
As always, Kurosawa’s cinematography isn’t blatant blasé slick, but thoughtfully, carefully providing information-rich frames, angles. The foreground, middleground, background are gorgeous silent dossiers. Also as expected, sumptuous lighting abound includes almost theatrical touches like kerosene lamps and moonlight kissing character’s profiles.
Successfully and tastefully marrying the concepts of literal and physical vs. metaphor and emotion, naïve vs. immature, all swaddled in swatches of obvious humor and somber reflection, seems as miraculous as waking up after a decade-long coma, making License to Live (Ningen Gokaku) a magical feat.
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