HIDETOSHI NISHIJIMA IN LICENSE TO LIVEKIYOSHI KUROSAWA: LICENSE TO LIVE ニンゲン合格 (1998) JAPAN CUTS 2025 Starman In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1998
License to Live, inspired by Sam Peckinpah's cult Western
Ballad of Cable Hogue, a guy wakes up 24 years old after ten years in a coma. He starts a mini dude ranch with one found horse and a milk bar on property belonging to his father that has a fish farm. It's a hangout movie riffing off the early seventies Hollywood indie style. Obviously this is, as a blurb says, "a marked departure from Kurosawa’s V-Cinema and horror fare, constituting an early show of the filmmaker’s remarkable adaptability and versatile range" - departing from his famous horror films like
Pulse and
Cure. This is an offbeat, indie, art film, charming by its oddity but making no effort to woo a mainstream audience. It's tailor made for film freaks who haunt the back aisles of Scarecrow Video looking for something old that is new.
As Yutaka, Hidetoshi Nishijima, later of
Drive My Car, in his first lead plays it for comedy and mime with a loose, floppy physicality, which he declares in his first moments by the balletic way he falls out of the hospital bed on awakening. Kurosawa is interested in Peckinpah, and also in a certain winsome sadness à la Fellini in
La Strada, but understated in a Japanese way. Young, long-haired and handsome, Nishijima's Rip van Winckle reborn man could be catnip to women in the audience if he wasn't so goofy and weird. He's a little like Jeff Bridges in John Carpenter's 1984
Starman. He's a tabula rasa, from outer space in a way, a young man with the mind of a fourteen-year-old who doesn't know what has happened in the past decade, stopped school in junior high, and ignores the books and magazines he's given to catch up. (He goes to his jr. high renunion later. The joke is his classmates are as out of it as he is.)
There's no rebirth, no burgeoning ambition, no love story for Yutaka. He isn't much interested in anything. The world he wakes up to, the world he doesh't know, isn't one that he wants. He has bursts of energy, and runs, grabs people, and throws things at them: under the indifference there is some rage.
No one much is interested in him. No family members turn up. The person who shows up first is Murota (Ren Osugi), the man who hit Yutaka's bike with his car, who informs him he has been covering his hospital bills all this time: he has given ten years of
his life too, he says, and he gives him one last payoff and says goodbye. It's Fujimori (Kôji Yakusho),a school friend of Yutaka's father no one seems to know, who collects Yutaka, who, in an abandonment of medical plausiblilty no doubt, is ready to walk and run and function normally after a minimum of physical therapy.
Yutaka is lakadaisical and without much enthusiasm or drive. He eventually winds up on land that formerly belonged to his father and adopts a small stray horse whose owner, when he appears, Fujimori pays off. There is a fish farm. It's a place, but not much of a place. Gradually Yutaka gets the idea of running a pony ranch - with the one small horse - combinned with a milk bar that also serves hot dogs and a fence he paints white. Now he seems content.
Yutaka's parents have separated and his sister has feuded with their mother. He finds his father with some difficulty and learns the latter has come from Europe and is shortly going to Africa in a sort of missionary role. He finds his mother too, and she is friendly. His sister involves a trip to a nightclub where she is a singer with bangs who perofrms walking around the tables.
But it's the unexpected spaces between these scenes that seem to matter most.
Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa: "I directed
License to Live with the intention, from the start, to completely draw my inspiration from
The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Of course, the genre is different ... However, the structure is...a character arrives in a new place and he finds a way of attracting new characters close to where he now lives; people come, a community forms itself, it becomes like a 'station', a stop-over or a coaching inn if you like. But the main protagonist dies, and all that is left are that place and the people inhabiting it. In that sense, for me,
License to Live and
The Ballad of Cable Hogue are one and the same thing... I believe it is neither a failure nor a success. It’s an attempt, and at the end, it’s maybe simply life itself."
For a more detailed online discussion of this film see the one by Jeff Stafford on
Cinema Sojourns.
License to Live ニンゲン合格 (Ningen Gokaku, "Passing human exam"), 109 min. Premiered at Tokyo Nov. 7, 1998, and was also included at Berlin, Toronto, and New York (NYFF). Screened today for this review as part of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa retro in Japan Cuts (July 10-20, 2025) in an archival 35mm Presentation—Introduction by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
SHOWTIME:
Thursday, July 17, 2025
9:30 pm
In-Person Event
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