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Living

Quiet dignity radiates from this moving remake of Kurosawa's Ikiru and it has the recognisable stamp of Kazuo Ishiguro all over it. This acclaimed (Nobel Prize-winning, even) novelist has previous with Merchant/Ivory fare - he wrote the screenplay for The White Countess and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted his great novel, The Remains of the Day - and Living isn't too far removed from the style of these Brit heavyweights. The focus is on stuffy Mr. Williams, played with fierce introspection by Bill Nighy. As much as we all want him to crack out some semi-drunken wittery, he holds himself in check, and it's probably his most mannered, yet natural performance. He's tip-top in this.

Set in early 1950s London, Ishiguro and director, Oliver Hermanus show Williams as a buttoned-up, broadsheet reading, Fortnum & Mason frequenting gentleman - in fact, he confesses that a gentleman was all he ever aspired to be. His confidante takes the form of a young clerk at his office, Miss Harris (the excellent Aimee Lou Wood). She's one of only two non-prats who work there, the other being the impressionable Wakeling, played neatly by Alex Sharp. The rest of the cast is filled with your rent-a-pom staples, best of these being Tom Burke and Adrian Rawlins, in vastly different roles (Burke seems to be channeling Orson Welles as if he'd somehow pitched up in Brighton).

Following a bit of bad news from the GP, Williams bunks off work with the intention of popping his clogs, but realises he'd rather not, thanks very much. On an aimless meander back in London he runs into Miss Harris and this encounter leads him to the decision that being so close to death he'd best get on with a spot of living. Central to this goal is the plight of a group of local women and their hopes of getting a playground built on a rubble-filled bombsite, a desperate reminder of the blitz. The retrospective scenes of Williams pushing this plan through the bureaucratic rings of the London City council are both maddening and satisfying.

This is a melancholic film, with an outsider's look at post-war London. Similar to how Tomas Alfredson turned his gaze on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hermanus gives us a film filled with the atmosphere of a time and place, unflustered by any perceived local bias. There are scenes that plod a bit, and moments that appear pretty unlikely (see the train discussion about Williams) but taken as a mood piece about grabbing your chance before it's too late, this works as well as you'd want. Add in the fact that it's always a treat to watch Bill Nighy and that's a fair cop for me.

Living is now showing at Luna and Palace cinemas.

See also: Going with the Ishiguro connection, you can't go wrong with either of The Remains of the Day (1993), directed by James Ivory, or Never Let Me Go (2010), directed by Mark Romanek.

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