Living Living

* * * * Stars - Rating PG13- 2022 - Drama - 1h 42m

In 1950s London a humorless bureaucrat decides to take time off work to experience life after receiving a grim diagnosis.

Cast: Bill Nighy Aimee Lou Wood and Alex Sharp

Official Trailer

Reviews

96% TOMATOMETER
86% AUDIENCE SCORE

Review by Leigh Paatsch - HeraldSun


The revered British actor Bill Nighy has been at the top of his game for as long as anyone can remember. Nevertheless it still comes as a shock to learn he recently turned 73 years of age as Nighy displays all the curiosity wonder and willingness to explore of performers much younger and hungrier than he.

The pay-off for Nighy's ever-evolving craft in his supposed "twilight years" is a new career peak in Living. In this flawlessly written and directed character study set in 1950s Britain Nighy plays a toffy civil servant known to one and all as Mr Williams.

This is a man who has lived for so long within a comfort zone of his own making - each day has its routines and rituals each relationship has its rules and limits - that he is ill-equipped to contemplate ever leaving it. So when Mr Williams learns he has a medical condition that may be bringing his well-ordered life to an unplanned end this inscrutable gent has some telling choices to make about how he will see out the rest of his days.

Though his character is tasked with a small journey Nighy makes sure we do not miss a single thing as Mr Williams tentatively returns to a world he thought he had left behind. Lovely stuff.

Review by PAUL BYRNES - TheAge


In 1972 Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru (To Live) was voted the 12th greatest film of all time. Now it is largely forgotten except by the hard core. Ikiru was the story of Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) an ageing Tokyo bureaucrat who discovers he has only a few months to live.

Realising his life is meaningless

- his work to this point even more so - he determines to achieve something good. The film is a masterpiece of restrained emotion without a moment's mawkishness partly because it is laced with satire about postwar occupied Japan where even Kurosawa's script had to be passed by American censors.

Daring to remake it takes either courage or foolishness and there's a little of both here. Bill Nighy's performance is as good as his nomination for an Oscar would suggest. Few can do so much with so few gestures. The film itself is like eating a rich dessert: you marvel at all the constituent parts but when it's over you may have regrets. It is lush and richly textured like the old colour footage of London that we see in the credits but just a little pushy.

The new script is by the 69-yearold Nobel prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro who was born in Nagasaki but moved to Britain at the age of five . The director is a 39-year-old South African Oliver Hermanus whose mixed-race parents were ANC activists.

Ishiguro and Hermanus may be an odd couple but their not-quite-Britishness works to advantage in the satire. Sometimes only a person who lives in Britain but is not of it can see the utter ridiculousness class brings to that culture.

The movie begins with a cracking demonstration. The setting is July 1953 eight years into the recovery from war. Peace and order have returned especially the latter. One young man in a bowler hat meets four other men in bowler hats at a station in the leafy outer suburbs.

Mr Wakeling (Alex Sharp) is the new boy joining the others on the journey to work. They warn him to watch himself with the boss. Mr Williams (Nighy) joins the train further along but does not sit with them. He looks like an undertaker and that's appropriate: he soon learns he will be needing one within six to nine months.

Mr Williams barely speaks let alone chats. The London County Council their workplace is like a beehive without worker bees. They shuffle files from department to department. Mr Williams sends the new boy to accompany " the ladies' ' - a group of three women who show up every week to petition the council to build a park in a filthy sewage-ridden bomb site.

This is by way of initiation but it has the opposite effect: young Wakeling is not yet deadened with cynicism. In fact he is thoroughly decent. He has a shy regard for the young woman sitting opposite Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood).

The film follows closely the form of the original down to individual scenes if not dialogue but it has a different feel. Kurosawa took great pains to hold back the pathos.

The material is dripping with emotion: best not to show it or even perform it.

The remake is less disciplined. Nighy takes long and tearful moments in front of a mirror; he mopes mournfully after the diagnosis sitting in the dark at home as his son and daughter-inlaw witter.

In both versions the dying man must rise to a state of grace where he realises what he must do. In this of course Nighy makes the film his own deploying his icemelting smile in just a few scenes.

In both movies the man gets drunk and sings a sad song in a late-night club. In one of the film's finest moments Nighy sings an old Scottish song his heart opened up by booze and pain. It's a scene worthy of Terence Davies.

If you have not seen the original this new version can stand on its own feet even with its occasional hectoring tendencies. It was never going to top the original but it may help to stimulate its memory.

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