License to Live

『ニンゲン合格』
Ningen Gokaku

Archival 35mm Presentation—Introduction by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fascinating reconstruction of a 1970 Jason Robards picture—Sam Peckinpah’s frontier western The Ballad of Cable Hogue to be exact—lifts the framework of Bloody Sam’s uncharacteristically subdued hangout film while substituting the twilight days of the Old West for 1990s Tokyo. Awakening from a 10-year coma, 24-year-old Yutaka (Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima in his first lead role) finds that his family has separated in the decade-long interim. Expressing disinterest in the time lost, the lackadaisical Yutaka, with the help of his father’s old college friend Fujimori (Koji Yakusho), resolves to establish a pony ranch on a plot once owned by his family, forming an outpost which welcomes a community of outsiders. Irreverent, wryly comic and heartfelt, License to Live is a marked departure from Kurosawa’s V-Cinema and horror fare, constituting an early show of the filmmaker’s remarkable adaptability and versatile range.

Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998, 109 min, 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Hidetoshi Nishijima, Koji Yakusho, Shun Sugata.

Part of JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film 2025
July 10—20, 2025

JAPAN CUTS is the largest showcase of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America and an annual highlight of New York’s cinema scene.

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Image: © KADOKAWA 1999

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