1998 · drama · family · memory
License to Live
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa1h 50m1998
Having fallen into a coma following a car accident at 14, Yutaka wakes ten years later and realizes that his family is no longer intact: father, mother and sister live at different places, so he decides to reopen the farm that his family once ran.
Our read: License to Live (1998) reads as a sombre, measured, inventive drama · family · memory entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook.
Sombre, measured, measured drama / family, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured.
- sombre
- measured
Watching License to Live tonight? Spin for your lens.
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How License to Live feels to watch.
Each axis is scored by hand, not from votes or genre averages. The bar uses the film's own colours.
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a quirky deadpan Japanese dramedy of a man rebuilding after waking from coma.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if slow oddball family reconstruction with black comedy undertones feels too quiet.
Eight films that feel like this one.
Closest in the twelve-axis space, not “people also liked”. All films like License to Live, with why →
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