“from the assembly line you never escape / you don't escape - to the machine / from the eight hours you don't run away / leaving the assembly line / the machine / the machine still happens / the assembly / the assembly line becomes stronger / in your path that you walk / then on the tram / then by car / then at home / in the family it increases again, the assembly line feels / this very strong pressure is felt / you can't escape the machine, not even in the family / even in the revolution / in love you feel it / in the revolution even more and especially the assembly line is felt / it is felt again in enthusiasm / in enthusiasm” (Gilles Deleuze / Carmelo Bene)
The existence of our existence in time, perpetuated in days built to the measure of the assembly line of useless doing, the buried living, institutionalized, the bureaucracy of our emotions and within feelings.
Days disappear covered by behaviors always the same and increasingly self-serving, until a blow straight to the face shakes you, you stagger trying to understand; it is life, not that of existing as beings as such, but your own true life that dresses with the cloak of illness, tragedy or death.
The film's story is revealed from the very first shot, the protagonist's stomach tumor is shown through an X-ray. Watanabe is a municipal employee, his life is marked by the usual gestures repeated day after day, at work the bureaucratic loopholes block the practices and requests that wander like ghosts from office to office.
However, that X-ray will give Watanabe the possibility of redemption, a new birth in the few remaining months.
Kurosawa, in his aesthetic vision, manages to convey all the poetry of a man who desperately gathers the pieces of his life and reacts, doing so without pity, instead creating anger and emotion in the viewer.
It is not a given that those who have nothing left to lose can express the courage Watanabe had in accomplishing his final task; the various flashbacks during his funeral ceremony bring back moments from the man's last months and show a moral strength that can indeed come from an awareness, but also from an innate way of conceiving existence and living, although this way has been subdued by society, by work, and by routine; for this reason, Watanabe is a model, because as highlighted during the ceremony while the mayor, colleagues, and son persevere in their vision of a static world, made of flesh and paper, he already had the serenity and eyes of one who has already seen beyond, like a Christ among Christs now made only of his intent, to which, however, it will not be possible to recognize anything in this world of machine-men.
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