FILM REVIEWS: J. M. Coetzee on Ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa (The New York Review of Books; August 13, 2009)

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From ' Summertime' : Notebooks 1972-1975

2 September 1973

At the Empire Cinema in Muizenberg last night, an early film of Kurosawa's, To Live. A stodgy bureaucrat learns that he has cancer and has only months to live. He is stunned, does not know what to do with himself, where to turn.
...He takes his secretary, a bubbly but mindless young woman, out to tea. When she tries to leave he holds her back, gripping her arm. "I want to be like you!" he says. "But I don't know how!" She is repelled by the nakedness of his appeal.
...Question: How would he react if his father were to grip his arm like that?


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