Akira Kurosawa‘s career is marked by several notable adaptations and remakes. Throughout his career, the great Japanese film director has contributed to building bridges between cultures, texts by great writers and film schools. Several of his famous films are adaptations of Shakespeare, and some of his films have been taken up as remakes or inspired other films in cinemas outside of Japan. To the latter list is now added ‘Living‘ made in 2022 by South African-born director Oliver Hermanus, which is a remake of one of Kurosawa‘s best known and most appreciated films – ‘Ikiru‘ (1952). The adaptation is faithful enough that Kurosawa‘s name appears as co-writer on the credits, but the other name is that of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, himself a symbol of the bridges between Japanese and Western culture in the plan literature.
The story in the film takes place in the second half of 1953 in England. Mr. Williams, the main hero of the film, is the epitome of the English civil servant, always dressed in three piece suits, punctual, bureaucratic and formalist in behavior and way of speaking. The office he heads in the city hall, responsible for approvals for public constructions, specializes in accumulating huge stacks of files on tables (their height being a measure of the degree of necessity of the position of the owner of the desk) and passing the responsibilities as much as possible to other departments. His world is turned upside down in an instant when he learns that he is terminally ill and has only a few months to live. He would like to recover what he had not experienced before – life. But how? Apparently he had achieved what he had dreamed of as a child. He became a respectable gentleman, but on the inside he is dry, maybe dead. A young subordinate had nicknamed him ‘The Zombie’. What does life mean? Drinking and partying in neighborhoods and bars of dubious reputation? From whom can he learn to live? From debauched occasional friends? Perhaps from the young underling who seems to be enjoying her youth to the fullest? But isn’t it too late for him? Or maybe the last months of life are still enough to do something significant, to leave behind a small space of beauty, or some model of acting for good?
Ishiguro‘s adaptation does an excellent job of translating the character’s restraint and formality from Kurosawa‘s film into the restrained pathos of Mr. Williams in Oliver Hermanus‘s film. Well versed in the social codes and psychology of characters in both Japanese and English cultures, Ishiguro constructs psychological equivalents that work very well. Less successful, however, seemed to me to be the transplantation of the actual story from post-war Japan to England of the same period. The details of the story are quickly dispatched and for those who do not know Kurosawa‘s film, there are quite a few gaps to fill. The scenes depicting the English bureaucracy are delicious, but others, such as the activism of the group of women trying to build a children’s play park on a site left in ruins after the destruction of Blitz bombing, are only sketchy. Even the beautiful final scene does not quite fit into the logic of the film for those who are not familiar with the corresponding scene from ‘Ikiru‘. However, these shortcomings of the script are largely compensated by the splendid performance of Bill Nighy – an actor known for many supporting roles, who receives here the opportunity for a ‘role of his life’ and uses it to the fullest. Even if it doesn’t measure up to its Japanese model, ‘Living‘ is worth seeing for Nighy‘s performance, for the image of a London filmed in the style and atmosphere of 1953, and for the message about living life with meaning.