![]() ![]() Living screened at the Sundance film festival and is released in the UK on 4 November. This is a film which resonated in my mind, with its perennial question: isn’t it possible to achieve Mr Williams’s passionate dedication without the terminal illness? After all, haven’t we all got that same mortal prognosis? Or is the terrible paradox that you need to be told what you know already but were trying not to think about? A gentle, exquisitely sad film. ![]() With its humble little swing set and roundabout, it is a symbol of everyone’s brief attempt at living. In Living, the playground is not simply the widow’s-mite gift the civil servant has poignantly handed over to the community before his death. But Ishiguro makes an inspired adjustment to the children’s playground itself – with Mr Williams noting that though some children are badly behaved and tantrum-prone when they are called away by their mothers, that is better than being one of those children who just hopelessly wait for playtime to end. It has all passed like a swift, featureless dream. I was sorry that Ishiguro removed my favourite moment from Ikiru, when the civil servant, in a flash of existential panic, realises that he cannot think of any specific thing that has happened in his 30 years’ employment. ![]() He has found a sweeter, more positive interpretation of the film’s final scenes, and a redemptive love affair among the younger generation, but kept the central structural coup in Ikiru, positioning the moment of the civil servant’s death so that we see all the besuited functionaries bickering and posturing after Mr Williams is gone, like Ivan Ilych’s colleagues in Tolstoy’s story or the people divvying up Scrooge’s bed linen in A Christmas Carol. Maybe they seemed too Greeneian in 50s Britain. Ishiguro has jettisoned the enigmatic, almost Capraesque voiceover from Kurosawa’s film, lost also the local gangsters that Watanabe faces down with his new, reckless courage of cancer. By Matt Fowler Posted: 11:15 am Very few actors feel more front and center these days than Pedro Pascal, who, over the last decades, has parleyed his. Meanwhile, a young man just starting there, played by Alex Sharp, intuits Mr Williams’s pain and sees how he himself might wind up the same way, out of unexamined loyalty to this older generation’s self-sacrificial woes. His poignantly damaged rebirth has been caused by his diagnosis, and also his platonic yet nonetheless scandalous infatuation with a female junior: the innocently flirtatious Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), who entrances him, perhaps chiefly because she is quitting this dull office and trying something new. This is a man who has had to suppress a natural wit and affectionate raillery all his life in the service of a dull job which meant nothing. The film is a timeless classic of American cinema, with its exploration of the meaning of life and the impact of an individual on the lives of others resonating. Nighy is heartbreakingly shy and sensitive, his refined, almost birdlike profile presented to the camera in occasional stark and enigmatic closeups. ![]()
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