Sentiment and understatement meet in this beautifully melancholy (end-of-) life drama, based on Akira Kurosawa’s low-key 1952 gem, Ikiru. Elegantly directed by South African film-maker Oliver Hermanus (who helmed the 2019 adaptation of André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical Moffie) and boasting deeply affecting performances from national treasure Bill Nighy and rising star Aimee Lou Wood (regular of the hit Netflix series Sex Education), this deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.
Nighy brings his most austere face to the role of Mr Williams, a softly spoken bureaucrat (“a decent sort, if a little on the frosty side”) working in London’s County Hall, where piles of paperwork accumulate in teetering towers of inaction and obfuscation. “We can keep it here for now,” says Williams of a well-presented petition by a group of local women from Chester Street to build a play park on a bombsite – a file that has already done the rounds of umpteen other departments (parks; planning; cleaning and sewage) before returning to his desk, where it will sit and gather dust. “It’ll do no harm.”
This lonely widower (Nighy describes his character as being “institutionalised by grief”) lives at home with his frustrated son and tetchy daughter-in-law, whom he overhears arguing about their long-awaited inheritance and their desire to escape “this stifling house”. When his doctor gives him just a short time to live, Williams feels a desperate urge to make the most of whatever time he has left, to “live a little”, even though he doesn’t know how. A brief flit to a coastal resort offers scant reward, despite the best efforts of Tom Burke’s rakish Mr Sutherland, the local roué behind such “smutty and trivial” productions as Shocking Stockings, who shows his new acquaintance the nightlife.
Back in central London, Williams chances upon Miss Margaret Harris (Wood), a former County Hall employee who has ditched the grind for a new job at a Lyons Corner House. “To be alive like that for one day!” Williams says of the youthfully spirited Margaret, who secretly used to call him Mr Zombie (“dead, but not dead”), a nickname he finds wholly appropriate. Gradually, as he mourns for his own lost youth, Williams starts to wonder whether that unbuilt playground might not hold the key to redemption.
Screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have formed the basis of very fine films, brings a fresh perspective to the themes of Kurosawa’s classic (itself inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich), while retaining a key structural device that allows the third act to loop back upon itself in hauntingly meditative fashion. That sense of cyclical duality is mirrored visually as opening newsreel footage of 1950s London blends seamlessly into elegantly choreographed frames that recall the future-retro feel of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, before giving way to dreamier hues, as cinematographer Jamie Ramsay charts Mr Williams’s search for his lost self.
At the heart of that search are Williams’s conversations with Miss Harris, and Nighy and Wood do a terrific job of capturing both the polite awkwardness and platonic intimacy of their interactions. There’s real joy to be found in Wood’s wide-eyed reaction to the prospect of a knickerbocker glory at Fortnum’s, and palpable despair in the symphony of micro-expressions that flit across Nighy’s face in the doctor’s office, when all he can say is “Quite”.
Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s gorgeous score shifts from the spiralling-piano-arpeggios of office life to the more ghostly introspection of flashback scenes (black-and-white images turning to colour) and low strings that counterpoint the external gaiety of burlesque circus revelry. Meanwhile, the popular Japanese ballad Gondola no Uta that played a key role in Ikiru is replaced with the well-chosen traditional Scottish song The Rowan Tree, reducing Williams to hopeless mournful silence when he first sings it in a boozy dive, then later resurfacing as a note of hope and reconciliation – a sublime moment in which the recurrent overhead shots that previously belittled him suddenly seem to allow his soul to soar.