Review: Living
Blu-ray, DVD & Digital: Living (2022)
Any script by Kazuo Ishiguro is certain to be special, and ‘Living,’ adapted from the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa), is quite…. beautiful in that utterly British, restrained way that Ishiguro excels in.
Set in a post war, 1953 London, it tells the story of a sad, grey man, a ‘gentleman’; Mr William’s (Bill Nighy) who heads the Public Works department in the local city hall.
We see his colleagues, all drab, jobsworth males, except for Miss Harries (the wonderful Any Lou Harris), who is about to escape to another job. He runs his office like his life, same old thing, day after day, no change, never really getting anything done as paperwork piles up as they all avoid actually doing any work, or any ‘good’ in the city.
Mr Williams then gets a terminal illness diagnosis and skives off work intending to commit suicide, but instead meets Mr. Sutherland, an insomniac writer he meets in a restaurant. He’s so moved by Williams’ story, he takes him for a night on the town, where Williams sings The Rowan Tree.
Williams returns to London to tell his son the news, but instead bumps into Miss Harries and takes her for lunch. A neighbour sees them and tells his daughter-in-law he’s messing around with a young woman. He wants to spend more time with Miss Harris, just because she’s ‘alive’ and full of fun, but he soon realises his legacy must be some good deed he can leave behind.
‘Living’ is a very British film, not a complicated story, in fact there’s not a lot to it, but what makes it all so sad and emotional is Nighy’s performance as a man who knows he’s wasted his life just as its too late, a man who can’t even tell his own son he’s dying, because he knows in his heart he doesn’t really care. A man who hopes to change something, and does so in the knowledge that it won’t last very long.
Such a sad and beautifully acted film, and Nighy was rightly was nominated for Best Actor at both the Oscars and Baftas.
Living is on digital 3rd March and Blu-ray & DVD 13th March 2023.
Review by Tina from a disc kindly supplied by LionsgateUK via Alternate Current.