Living

Director: Oliver Hermanus
Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro
Producers: Stephen Wooley, Elizabeth Karlsen
Starring: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharpe, Tom Burke
Year: 2022
Country: UK
BBFC Certification: 12
Duration: 102 mins

Remakes. There’s a part of us cineastes, perhaps the snob centre of the brain, that reacts to the notion of remakes with the same wearied apprehension that we normally reserve for unwarranted sequels, nostalgia-hungry reboots or the upcoming 812th instalment from the MCU. But without that compulsion to revisit stories already told, we wouldn’t have the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, John Carpenter’s The Thing, George Cukor’s A Star is Born or Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. Granted, neither would we have Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man but let’s not derail my point so early in the review. Remakes sometimes surpass their source material and those that fall a long way short generally just disappear into obscurity or some perverse cult bracket (hello again LaBute’s Wicker Man). Oliver Hermanus’s Living does none of those things. Based on Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (itself based on a Tolstoy novella), it convincingly reimagines Kurosawa’s humanist masterpiece about the faltering state of Japanese bureaucracy and family dynamics as a comment on stuffy British attitudes and equally detrimental bureaucratic decay. Although it can’t surpass Kurosawa, Living more than justifies its existence and I can only commend it for aiming so high and emerging relatively unscathed.

The process of adapting Ikiru into Living, the story of high-ranking bureaucrat Rodney Williams, who discovers he has only months left to live and begins to reassess his life, fell to acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who’s screenplay does a wonderful job of filling out the world of 50s London with eccentrics and grotesques who add colour to the sidelines of the deliberately fusty foreground. Despite the potentially morbid subject matter, Living has plenty of leavening humour, with snippets of trivial conversations and small, inconsequential relationships providing a rich backdrop. Rather than mere despair, there’s a wistful philosophical bent to Williams’ shifting reaction to his diagnosis that makes the film cautiously uplifting. As an effective juxtaposition, by retaining Kurosawa’s cynical punchline Living does itself proud, although it really should have trusted the epilogue to prevent audiences leaving under a cloud, rather than tagging on a drearily unconvincing romance the like of which was once a prerequisite. On the one hand, its presence could be attributed to Living’s element of 50s pastiche, as epitomised by its handsomely retro opening titles. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone would’ve noticed if this naff strand had been excluded, along with the rather-too-prominent ‘THE END’ caption that consumes the whole screen when an understated fade to black could’ve been more moving.

These are nitpicks, of course, and on the whole Living is an emotionally resonant, effective remake that remains fairly faithful to its source but finds its own identity through its relocation to London. There’s a slight stagey style to a lot of the acting here, which actually works rather well in conjuring up an ethereal, dreamlike version of 50s London who’s artifice contrasts beautifully with the gravity of the subject matter. This acting style also has the effect of further highlighting the quite wonderful central performance of Bill Nighy, who moves through the stages of shock, grief and reflection with a hangdog realism. He begins as just another stiff piece on the gameboard before his diagnosis shakes loose long-buried emotions and aspirations. Nighy is particularly wonderful in a sequence in which he goes on a drunken bender in a seaside town and breaks down while singing a song from his past. After a long and distinguished career, Nighy finally netted himself an Oscar nomination for this role and it is well deserved.

With its beautifully shot images of steam trains and big red buses, Living immediately characterises itself as a modest descendent of those prestige British heritage films but the tone here is as critical as it is nostalgic, with a sense that the oppressiveness of British society could, and still can, create a proliferation of business zombies, traipsing through life with a rigidity that achieves nothing in terms of either a job well done or a life well lived. But, like Ikiru before it, Living concludes with both a hopeful note about the possibility of breaking free from this state and a bleak warning of the difficulty of doing so.

Living is on digital 3 March and Blu-ray & DVD 13 March 2023

Trailer YouTube: https://youtu.be/t2L8CP31-14