One of Kurosawa's most deeply felt films, Ikiru has the timeless quality of a literary masterpiece; at the same time it is a searing portrait of modern society in which individual will is lost to an impotent bureaucracy. Ikiru tells of a municipal government functionary, one Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), Chief, Citizens' Section, whose life is profoundly changed when he learns he has terminal cancer. Twenty-five years behind a desk piled high with papers-his office nickname is The Mummy-Watanabe is looking at his watch when we first meet him; this habitual gesture soon will gain new meaning. In a hospital waiting room, a fellow patient advises him, "If the doctor says you can eat anything, you have six months to live"... Watanabe's metamorphosis from Mummy to conscious being is one of the great transformations in cinema, with no special effects required. As he begins to reject his past-his government service, his devotion to an unworthy son-into his life comes a curious novelist, a sort of kinder gentler Mephistopheles who shows Watanabe a night on the town, dazzling in its possibilities-but also gleaming in mirrored reflections. By morning Watanabe knows that to live is to act. With incredible tenacity he engages in his first and last struggle with the bureaucracy on behalf of The Citizens, one that will give his life, and thus his death, meaning. A cinematic tour-de-force that travels in and out of time-frames like a camera of the mind, Ikiru's most basic challenge is contained in its title: to live.