Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.