Bill Nighy's remark in a recent interview that this film is 'about procrastination', brings a natural questioning of where the dead weight in your life may lie - when and why would you start Living?
Living actualises a Kazuo Ishiguro screenplay, adapting Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama Ikiru, following Williams (Bill Nighy), an elderly man, across the final months of his life. The film opens with 1920s archive footage of London, exuding a certain warmth of spirit, which is soon crushed by a formality that permeates across an office environment. The film, very simply and effectively, translates this grating mundanity of unactualised daily life, through the writing, and the reserved performances. I appreciated Ishiguro refraining from revealing most characters’ first names to accentuate this boundary of formality, that can infect a household as much as a workplace.
Living is a film to experience, not over intellectualise
A film such as this I find painful to review. Breaking the illusion that I do actually always watch films in this manner, I find that some films aren’t made for such an investigation. Living is a film to experience, not over intellectualise. Any criticism I make will have an undertone of meanness to it, for which I can only apologise.
Living’s colour grading is far too saturated, although it could arguably be playing into the script’s over-sentimentality, at times it feels a bit too bright and glamorous for a film with such a dark undertone. There are, however, moments of real visual beauty, whereby the colours play into the visual storytelling, melding smoothly with the subtext.
Aimee Lou-Wood being a real standout, forming such a terrific alliance with Bill Nighy
The performances across the board were very strong, with Aimee Lou-Wood being a real standout, forming such a terrific alliance with Bill Nighy. The script, like the directing and cinematography, has an ebb and flow, but the script’s weaknesses never let the acting falter.
Ishiguro stands my favourite novelist, so it really saddens me to critique his works, but this script is oftentimes a dry and patronising display of on-screen kitsch; yet other times an honest and vulnerable study of gender and generational roles, and how it disconnects certain people from different situations, ridding them of a say. Even within it’s hour-and-forty-minute runtime, there was frivolousness – which I can often excuse in Ishiguro’s writing because of its softness, but there’s a heavy-handedness to it this time around.
All these complaints and praises voiced, I left the cinema lukewarm about the film, and I remain as such. It’s an easy watch that shouldn’t be experienced with a ‘reviewer hat’ on, and its sentimentality – which Bill Nighy conveys so gently – partnered with an uplifting essence, is undeniable. I don’t often make such a remark, but I feel obliged to judging by my confliction on the film – watch this film for yourself and forge your own opinion.