There is a profound elegance and beauty to Oliver Hermanus’s new film Living. A transplanting by Kazuo Ishiguro’s screenplay of Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru to post war Britain. This awfully simple tale of a man who has consistently gone about his work and life with a certain malaise and disinterest only to attempt to make more out of life when he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. There is indeed a profound elegance and beauty to Living, and albeit being indeed one of the more subdued and quieter films of the year, it ends up being certainly one of the most emotionally affecting.
There is a simplicity and simultaneously a profoundness to Living that is a little confounding in its ability to balance both. It’s also for lack of a better way to say it, a genuinely perfect film. One can’t really find a fault in the thing. It moves like an elegant short story in ways, yet still feels like a whole feature. It’s a small tale in the grand scheme of things, but one that is intentionally a blowing up of something that could be seen as singular and simple, despite the natural tragedy of the instigating circumstances. But as a film it could be said that ultimately the terminal cancer is more or less a simple instigator, rather than the whole crux of the narrative of the piece. This is a film of small interactions and weighty interactions, all told and delivered and written and directed with the same slightly removed quality. This is of course a tremendously British film and based entirely on that very polite remove that Ishiguro brought to the screen so exceptionally before, when his novel The Remains of the Day was adapted for the screen by Merchant-Ivory. Here bringing this almost timeless tale of personal repression into the world societal repression brings a perfect new place for this tale to be told. And indeed it is told beautifully. Ishiguro’s script is touching and triumphant, with moments of great humour, very touching sadness and some unexpected moments of weight in places where one wouldn’t think they’d be initially placed. The sort of hugely emotional scenes you think you’d find in this tale are dismissed by an at first shocking and then profoundly well handled structure that defies the typical nature of these sorts of films. It’s a very high quality piece of writing and adaptation from Ishiguro, as of course we have naturally come to expect.
All of this is
brought to the screen very efficiently and with a nice level of creative flare
by Oliver Hermanus who manages to make this rather interior tale also feel very
different from other such stuffy sort of period films this could be seen as. Of
course I think the film is being boasted chiefly as an Oscar vehicle for Bill Nighy,
in the sort of career achievement award role that would be ripe for a nomination.
However the great triumph of the performance is that it’s so incredibly under-stated,
there are no huge revelation arguments or screaming matches, just a few simple
and effective and beautifully delivered monologues and scenes shared with the film’s
other performance highlight, Aimee Lou-Wood. This pairing of talents of
different generations give these beautifully crafted Ishiguro scenes an incredible
emotional depth at times exterior, but mostly subdued and seen only at glimpses
of release. Tom Burke is a more bombastic highlight as a gregarious playwright
who comes into Nighy’s life for an initial sequence of attempted living, and
does a very solid job at being the first encounter in a series. The film as
much a series of encounters as it is one tale and through the eyes mostly of
Alex Sharp, we begin to see Nighy’s effect on others and their effect on him. This
is above all else an incredibly elegant film primarily focussed upon legacy and
the like.
A sublime 9/10 beauty of a piece of film. In actuality the film is perfect in every regard, it’s the sort of film where you want to give it 10/10 as you don’t really know what one could say is wrong with the feature, but overall it feels a little slight in nature one would have to say. However a perfect, if simple, film of this beauty and quality is certainly not something to look down upon. It’s beautiful, profound and elegantly told to a fault. Nighy and Lou-Wood are similarly sublime and overall the film packs a subtle emotional power that can’t be denied. A truly sublime work, indeed.
P.S. It’s sometimes hard to recommend a film like this, because after-all it is at times intentionally slow and languid, and yet one must recommend, as the actual emotional experience of watching the film is such a compelling and inevitable one.
- - Thomas Carruthers
0 Comments