Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
As I stated in my Sundance preview, even if westernized remakes of Akira Kurosawa’s filmography have been standardized throughout history — one only needs to look at how the Japanese icon’s masterpiece shaped the trajectory of the western once Yojimbo and Seven Samurai made their way to these and Italian shores — it’s still a pretty hard sell in this day and age for any filmmaker, no matter how experienced or accomplished, to craft a new take on one of his classics. Doubly do for Ikiru, which has been routinely hailed as one of the greatest films ever made and is also perhaps the most personal of Kurosawa’s non-samurai, non-noir repertoire beyond, say, Dreams. It would be like remaking Kane or even Casablanca (though Barb Wire technically did so), though that hasn’t stopped some from trying and failing, given how Tom Hanks was once attached to an Americanized version years ago that never really went anywhere. But it seems that director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro have cracked the code with Living, which sees the story of a stately and reserved bureaucrat, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, attempting to break free of the veneer of restrained “respectability” he labored for so long to preserve, successfully adapted to perhaps the only other culture as labyrinth-like in its byzantine accumulation of manners and stoic mindset: the English.
Our bureaucrat here is Williams, who is played to perfection by Bill Nighy in what feels like the kind of late-career role he’s always deserved since becoming an elder statesman of British cinema, who is in charge of a planning committee within the government, overseeing the aspects of the country’s rebuilding following the end of the war. It’s the mid-’50s, after all, and the world is slowly starting to move by him — he’s a longtime widower, and his adult son, who lives with him, has been married and the elder man doesn’t want to bother him with his issues, given that he’s “got his own life now” — and his diagnosis causes him to reflect on what exactly he’s done so wrong. An unplanned excursion to a seaside town, done in order so that he can provide himself with a few fun days before he downs a few bottles of sleeping pills, doesn’t go as expected: a chance encounter with an entertainer/writer (Tom Burke) leads to a night out of drinking and “fun,” at the intersection of boozy good times and also crippling pain that things — the night, his life — will soon come to an end. Williams realizes that he doesn’t have the gusto to go through with the act. So he returns to London, wandering aimlessly around the streets instead of holding court at the head of his open-desk office when he runs into Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), a young woman who used to work for him. They reconnect and become fast friends, though, as one might expect, some of the folk in his small London suburb assume that he’s got impure motivations for his encounters with the girl. It’s simpler than that, though: he just admires her attitude, her pure joy at being alive, and he wishes to understand and learn from it. He decides to do one solidly good thing in his power, which is to transform a bombed-out ruin into a playground, as a group of mothers in the neighborhood has been advocating for.
As you probably can tell, Hermanus and Ishiguro don’t reinvent the wheel, given how much of Kurosawa’s text remains intact here, spruced up a bit by the Man Booker-winning author’s flair for conversational language. The director, known best for his South African works like Beauty, is restrained and composed in his manner here, focusing intensely on mirroring his character’s mental state in his filmmaking, slowly bringing more and more color and clarity into the situation as he himself becomes more aware. It’s a lovely visual tribute to other English films made during the period in which Living takes place, and besides Nighy’s performance, may be the best aspect in the film’s cultural transformation. On the other hand, Kurosawa’s structure has been altered, and a fair 30 to 40 minutes have been trimmed out of the film: There’s an element of weightlessness here to some of the things that, perhaps, should be more impactful (especially in the early going before the film begins to expand its emotional and visual palette), but they dovetail nicely into a bittersweet and slight cynicism present in the ending here, a touch of English fatalism at play, mainly meant to enhance the relative rarity of Williams’ breed, being a “gentleman” who could, ultimately, change when it mattered most to forestall his own death.
But regardless of translation, Ikiru and Living are ultimately both about the death of a single man, perfectly average in every single way so as almost to wholly represent an archetype, and how his unspecific blandness gives way to a rich and warm attitude when he’s freed by the presence of the reaper and the inertia caused by the endlessness of one’s days, so that he may do good before his time runs out. It may not ever be topped, but Living proves the continued relevance and beauty of a story like Ikiru, and serves as a reminder of the value of cross-cultural adaptation.