Film review: ‘LIVING’, by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’
The new British film Living, has followed quite a quite remarkable cultural pathway before arriving on our screens. Directed by a South African, Oliver Hermanus, it’s an adaption of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru which was itself based on Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Despite a fairly slender plot and some pretty obvious religious references, Living slowly seduces us with its touching human story and the quality of its performances.
Set in London in the early 1950’s, the film immerses us in the oppressive social order of post-war England. After the rousing strains of Vera Lynn and swing bands have faded and before rock’n’roll has upended culture and recharged society, people in cities like London were struggling to come to terms with wreckage left by the war and attempting to impose rigid order on the chaos they’d witnessed.
Nowhere, according to this film, was this awkward mix of regimentation and chaos more apparent than at the London City Council. Here, apparently, a stifling bureaucracy prevailed filled with worker drones surrounded by teetering stacks of paperwork and where public requests were batted back and forth between departments in which middle managers seemed more concerned about marking out their turf than actually achieving anything useful. The film establishes the threads of the council power structure early on as the bowler-hatted employees heading into London on the Hogwarts-like train grumpily convey to new employee Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), the hierarchy and protocol he must observe.
Submerged within this world is Head of Public Works, Rodney Williams (Bill Nighy) a taciturn, emotionless and forbidding figure whose life seems to run according to his gentleman’s pocket watch. When he learns that he has only a few months to live, he begins to recognise and grieve for the life he hasn’t lived and the personality that his work had ground out of him. As he ditches work, begins confiding in a young female colleague Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood) goes on a bender with a stranger who looks like a young Orson Welles (Tom Burke) and tries to do something useful with his Council position, we begin to see the passionate character living beneath the dour visage of Mr Williams.
As the provenance of this film suggests, this is a story that has been explored numerous times so it’s not startlingly original but it’s handled with such dignity and wry humour it doesn’t suffer too badly from over-familiarity.
This is, for the most part, an example of that movie sub-genre, the Bill Nighy film. The camera is largely centred on him and the film moves according to the unique rhythms of his speech and his idiosyncratic mannerisms. Nighy does what he has always done, elegance with a sly grin and a knowing wit although there’s a greater touch of melancholy here. In addition to Nighy, the entire cast do a fine job with Aimee Lou Wood memorable as the ebullient Margaret who radiates the sort of zest for life Williams has lost.
This film is aimed at an older demographic but the tasteful and intelligent script and it’s carpe diem theme should still resonate with most audiences.
Nick’s rating: ***1/2
Genre: Drama.
Classification: PG.
Director(s): Oliver Hermanus.
Release date: 16th Mar 2023..
Running time: 102 mins.
Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.