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In the program notes for the California premiere of Living (2022) at the 45th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival, David Riedel synopsized: “This beautiful drama, written by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) and directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie), poses a question: How does a repressed and ineffectual bureaucrat respond when he learns he has only six months to live? Mr. Williams is the most buttoned-up of individuals, but he decides that the time has arrived to assert himself, change a few lives, and inspire a few others—quietly, of course. As played by the incomparable Bill Nighy, Mr. Williams’ every muted tic, soft breath, and forlorn expression says more than words can convey. This is someone filled with regret for a life not lived and a future he won’t have. With stunning camera work, wonderful performances, and a beautiful sadness that is never morose, Living examines what happens when a man realizes he has long avoided the very things that give his life meaning.”
When I was a full scholar with the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, I learned about Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the role that archetypes played in predisposing one’s attitudes towards life. There are, of course, a certain number of archetypes laid out in his postulation of archetypal psychology, but among them there is only one hyphenated pairing: that joining the archetype of the puer, or eternal child, and the senex, the old man. James Hillman went so far as to propose that this dyadic archetype was the most important of all the archetypes. The puer-senex dyad has certainly been the most important archetype governing my life, reflected in how I got along best with those older than me when I was young and—now that I am old—my increasing reliance on the company of the young. An energy passes between these stations in life that defines the energy of life itself. That archetypal energy thrums beautifully throughout Living (2022), a Sony Pictures release that opens today at Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas, San Francisco, and rolls out in other Bay Area locations in following weeks throughout January. Living opens at The Flicks in Boise, Idaho on January 27, 2023.
Oliver Hermanus, the South African director whose previous efforts include Shirley Adams (2009), Beauty (2011), The Endless River (2015) and Moffie (2019) has skillfully directed an adaption by Kazuo Ishiguro of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), which in turn was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
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Again leaning into Jungian theory—albeit in, admittedly, an inexact way—Living particularly depicts a character in something of a “psychoid” state; i.e., his relationship to his memories is palpable, present, immediate, particularly right after Williams has received his diagnosis and is struggling to process the fact of his impending death. It’s not that he’s thinking about his past; he’s experiencing it directly, not just remembering but reliving it, relating to it, turning to face it as if it is sitting next to him, or walking towards him, or talking directly to him. His reactions are appropriately startled. His body is forcing him into a physical reckoning of his past, particularly in relation to when he was happy as a boy and young man; when happiness in and of itself was his purpose.
Cinematically, by way of Jamie Ramsay’s camerawork, the energy of life is understood through tonalities of color. The film begins in black and blue shades, with bowler hats, dark suits, and black umbrellas, a nearly funereal procession of functionaries waiting for a train, or—as one of those functionaries states it—as somber as going to church. Black, like silence, is the great equalizer that negates identity under the pressure of personal and professional propriety.
The first introduction of color is Williams’ purchase of a new hat after his dark bowler is stolen by a prostitute. He’s encouraged to buy the hat by Sutherland (Tom Burke), the young man with whom Williams spends a festive evening learning how to live again. This lightly-colored hat insinuates a new attitudinal disposition and is commented frequently upon in the film as being uncharacteristic (but welcome) in Williams’ appearance. The courtship of Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp) and Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) likewise introduces a world enlivened by color, not only in the landscape, but in their costuming. This use of color to connote change is a cinematic option that Kurosawa couldn’t indulge as Ikiru was shot in black and white, though no less lustrously by cinematographer Asakazu Nakai who referenced liveliness in reflected patterns of neon lights on windowshields. One uses the vibrancy of color to register liveliness; the other dynamic textures and patterning.
Composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch unexpectedly offsets the dampening of emotional affect with lush, romantic scoring and arrangements of such standards as “Yesterdays” (whose lyrics add poignance to the protagonist’s plight), “Alone Together”, “Coffee Time”, “Fascination” and “When Lights Are Low”, all strategically placed to further the narrative. But nothing packs quite the punch of Nighy drunkenly singing the old Scottish ballad “The Rowan Tree” which fills him with so much emotion over all he has lost and forsaken that he simply can’t continue. It’s heartbreaking and painful and instils in Sutherland, Williams’ young guide into the nightlife of London, that perhaps he too needs to take stock of his life and not throw it away. One senses that he has learned a painful lesson from Williams about not mistaking diversion or duty for purpose and meaning.
And as placement goes, I did appreciate the visual pun of the Oliver Bookstore in the background of one of the scenes. Hermanus’ tip of the hat to Hitchcock’s insertion of himself into his films, perhaps?
It was intriguing for me to watch Living and Ikiru back-to-back and—as much as Living was faithful to Ikiru’s narrative—Ishiguro’s adaptation is streamlined for more immediate emotional impact, reducing Ikiru’s two and a half hour playing time by 45 minutes. This afforded time to insert into Living two powerful scenes absent in Ikiru. First, the scene where Williams’ son Michael (Barney Fishwick) gleans from Margaret Harris that his father knew he was dying and told her, but not him, expresses the anguish of a son who realizes his selfishness has failed his father and who will from then on carry that burden of shame. The second is the closing conversation between Wakeling and the police officer at the playground site where Wakeling absolves the officer’s guilt for not encouraging Williams to get out of the cold and go home by confirming that the officer was correct in granting Williams his one moment of happiness.
Those scenes were welcome additions to the narrative, replacing the lengthy (almost comic) scene in Ikiru where Watanabe is in the doctor’s waiting room anxious to hear his prognosis, and being warned by a fellow patient to not believe the doctor’s double-speak. There’s no beating around the bush in Living. Williams is informed swiftly, almost mercilessly, that he has little time left to live. An economy that allows expansion elsewhere. In Ikuru’s wake scene Watanabe’s workmates proceed to get drunk and pontificate on the noticeable changes in his behavior and who should take claim for getting the children’s playground completed. Living reduces all that to a curtailed conversation in a train booth, which leads to the necessary question of what is this story actually trying to say? Is it really about being admired for what is left behind, for an accomplishment? In his farewell note to Wakeling, Williams makes it clear that what they have accomplished by building a children’s playground to replace a cesspool is a small modest thing that time will erase. So perhaps it's not so much about what’s left behind as what you do while you’re living, no matter how small or modest. Life must happen in order to be life.
There’s that lovely pivotal moment when Williams has admitted to Margaret Harris that he’s dying and expresses concern that like children on a playground where mothers have called them in from play, they have a right to be contrary and not want to come in. Whereas he simply sat in the corner of a playground, neither happy nor sad, just waiting for his mother to call him in. In that moment he discerned not only the happiness he had never felt as a child in a playground but the potential happiness he could feel by helping to build a playground for future children. What could be more tragic than to leave life never feeling that you had experienced a moment of happiness within it? Living feels triumphant—indeed hopeful—for allowing its protagonist that fleeting happiness, and thereby a life that isn’t completely meaningless. You can see this in William’s eagerness to finally do something and be part of life when he lifts his heels before stepping out into the rain to investigate the work site.
The structure of both Ikiru and Living has long fascinated me. Watanabe and Williams both come to the realization of what they must do before they can die. In the next scene they’re dead and being mourned by the living. But not only mourned. Questioned as well. Motivations scrutinized. The superiors want to take credit for getting the project done and resent that the people whose lives the playground impacted single Watanabe / Williams out as their hero. The higher-ups want to regale the efficiency of bureaucracy and not the passion of an individual. But as passion fueled by impending death becomes understood as the motivation, it become obvious that it was really Watanabe / Williams who got the playground constructed, working through channels of bureaucracy, yet despite them.
The spring to Williams’ step as he ventures out into the rain to investigate the potential playground site demarcates an old life for a new one, no matter how brief. As his co-workers come to the realization that he knew he was dying and was inspired to act in the time left to him, they become inflated with a forced positivity of his example. They promise themselves that within a system that basically values not getting anything done, they will buck the system and do what they can. But, of course, their hypocrisy surfaces at the first opportunity they have to follow Williams’ example. Why should they? They’re not dying. There’s no pressure to do the right thing when it is much more expedient not to.
The recognition of death, Joseph Campbell once told me, is what adds resonance to life. Without that recognition, you’re waking, working, sleeping, but not really living. Watanabe and Williams wasted most of their lives killing time with duty and responsibility, but each died knowing they had one true and genuine moment of life and imparting—in the saliency of their age—an informing energy to those younger. Margaret Harris and Wakeling, especially, have had their lives transformed by the old man’s vision, as much as he was able to find himself, through the example of their youthful vigor.
In cinematic history there are indelible images that survive across time and in both Ikiru and Living it is the image of an old man swinging in a children’s playground in the dead of winter singing a childhood tune to himself. A man doomed to die with snowflakes falling onto his new hat.
