Yutaka Yoshii (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a twenty-four-year-old man who suddenly wakes up from a coma after ten years and has to readjust to a new world. This is the basic set-up of Ningen Gokaku (English title: License to Live, 1998), a decidedly change-of-pace effort from Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is better known for creepy occult/psychological thrillers like Sweet Home (1989), Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001). You can only imagine what an American film studio would do with this simple concept – it would either become a rom-com like While You Were Sleeping (1995) or a horror flick such as The Dead Zone (1983) – but Kurosawa takes an approach that probably surprised even his most fervid fans. License to Live turns out to be a low-key, observational series of vignettes that slowly culminate in a moving meditation on the things that make the life of a human being worth living.
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Cinema Sojourns 