Heartbreakingly tender: Living reviewed

Living is a remake of one of the great existential masterpieces of the 20th century, Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), which didn’t need remaking, many will grumble, but once you’ve seen this you’ll be glad that it was. It is as profoundly and deeply felt as the original and as heartbreakingly tender. It asks the same question – what makes a life meaningful? – but this time with Englishness, bowler hats, the sweet trolley at Fortnum’s and Bill Nighy. Really, what more could you want?

The film is directed by Oliver Hermanus with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, who first mooted the idea. He wrote it especially for Nighy, who is receiving some of the best reviews of his career and who we can now forgive for playing Davy Jones with a squid face in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. It is set in 1952, with production values that will knock you out, as will the mid-century feel of the cinematography and the costume design by three-times Oscar winner Sandy Powell.

The film opens with a sea of bowler-hatted men in pinstripe suits commuting to their jobs in London. Among them is Mr Williams (Nighy), also exquisitely suited, whose first name we never learn, and who speaks in an almost-whisper, as though he’s barely alive. (He would probably be on antidepressants today.) He works for the LCC at County Hall where he has never accomplished anything. He has risen to the head of his section (Public Works) where he sits with tottering piles of documents on either side of his desk. Nothing is ever decided. Nothing ever gets done. None of it has meaning. Files are dispatched to Parks or Cleansing or Education, make their way back, return to the pile. Three East End women who are petitioning for a children’s playground on a bomb site that’s become a cesspool are shoved from pillar to post on a daily basis. It is truly Kafka-esque.

Everything changes when Mr Williams attends a doctor’s appointment and is told his stomach pains are cancer and he has six months to live. We know he is utterly forlorn even if nothing tells us he is utterly forlorn beyond a twitch to the jaw. It’s superbly minimal and affecting. He goes to Brighton and the first person he tells is a stranger (Tom Burke) he meets in a café. ‘I’ve come down here to enjoy myself,’ says Mr Williams, ‘but I don’t know how.’ Dying is bad; but it’s worse that he’s never lived. There follows a night of revelry: gambling parlours, dance halls, the red-light district. In one pub he sings the Scottish folk song ‘Oh Rowan Tree’, and everyone’s heart is quietly broken, as yours will be. He next strikes up a friendship with the young and adorable Miss Harris (adorably played by Aimee Lou Wood) who works in his department. He takes her to Fortnum’s – ‘Fortnum’s, Mr Williams!’ – and they hang out, yet their fondness for each other is too deep for it ever to become romantic or sexual. He is widowed and has an adult son with whom he yearns for intimacy. But neither have the tools to bring that about.

The death sentence proves his liberation as, with some urgency, he sets about accomplishing one worthwhile thing before he dies. This is beautifully performed all round, generally steers clear of sentimentality (unlike, say, It’s A Wonderful Life), doesn’t rely on a weepy soundtrack to induce emotion, which is my bugbear at the moment. It’s one of the few films that may actually inspire you to live differently and, perhaps, do something of value before it is too late.