Living is a 2022 British drama film directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted from the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa, which in turn was partly inspired by the 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Set in 1953 London, it depicts a bureaucrat in the county Public Works department (played by Bill Nighy) facing a fatal illness.
Living had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on 21 January 2022, and was released in the United Kingdom on 4 November 2022, by Lionsgate.[3] The film received positive reviews, with Nighy's performance receiving particular acclaim, and at the 95th Academy Awards was nominated for Best Actor (Nighy) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Rodney Williams is a senior London County Council bureaucrat in 1953 London. He sits at his desk surrounded by piles of paperwork, and seems uninspired. A group of women, led by Mrs Smith, petition the council to have a World War II bomb site redeveloped into a children’s playground. They are sent with their petition from department to department with a newer employee, Mr. Wakeling. Despite Wakeling's enthusiasm, he is stymied by an ossified and sclerotic bureauracy at every step. The petition makes the usual circular rounds and ends back with Williams, who places it back in his pile of paperwork, making clear to his colleagues his intention to take no further action.
When Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis he attempts unsuccessfully to tell his son Michael and daughter-in-law, Fiona. Williams then choses to withdraw half of his life savings, purchase a lethal amount of sleeping medicine, and commit suicide in a seaside resort town. Finding himself unable to go through with it, he gives the sleeping medicine to Mr. Sutherland, an insomniac writer he meets in a café. Moved by Williams's story, Sutherland takes him for a night on the town, where Williams replaces his traditional bowler hat with a fedora after his bowler hat is stolen by a prostitute. The pair go to bars, sing, drink heavily and attend a striptease/burlesque show.
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BASED OFF OF BELOW
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Ikiru (生きる, "To Live") is a 1952 Japanese drama film directed and co-written (with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni) by Akira Kurosawa. The film examines the struggles of a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura) and his final quest for meaning. The screenplay was partly inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
The major themes of the film include learning how to live, the inefficiency of bureaucracy, and decaying family life in Japan, which have been the subject of analysis by academics and critics. Having won awards for Best Film at the Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Film Awards, it is considered one of the greatest films of all time.[1][2][3]
Kanji Watanabe has worked in the same monotonous, bureaucratic position for 30 years, and he is near his retirement. His wife is dead, and his son, Mitsuo, and daughter-in-law, who live with him, seem to care mainly about Watanabe's pension and their future inheritance. At work, he's a party to constant bureaucratic inaction. In one case, a group of parents seemingly endlessly are referred to one department after another when they want a cesspool cleared and replaced by a playground. After learning he has stomach cancer and less than a year to live, Watanabe attempts to come to terms with his impending death. He plans to tell his son about the cancer, but decides against it when his son does not pay attention to him. He then tries to find escape in the pleasures of Tokyo's nightlife, guided by an eccentric novelist whom he has just met. In a nightclub, Watanabe requests a song from the piano player, and sings "Gondola no Uta" with great sadness. His singing greatly affects those watching him. After one night submerged in the nightlife, he realizes this is not the solution.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich (also Romanized Ilich, Ilych, Ilyitch; Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича, romanized: Smert' Ivána Ilyicha), first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.
Considered to be one of the finest examples of a novella,[1] The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness.
Ivan Ilyich lives a carefree life that is "most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Like everyone he knows, he spends his life climbing the social ladder. Enduring marriage to a woman whom he often finds too demanding, he works his way up to be a magistrate, thanks to the influence he has over a friend who has just been promoted, focusing more on his work as his family life becomes less tolerable.
While hanging curtains for his new home one day, he falls awkwardly and hurts his side. Though he does not think much of it at first, he begins to suffer from a pain in his side. As his discomfort grows, his behavior towards his family becomes more irritable. His wife finally insists that he visit a physician. The physician cannot pinpoint the source of his malady, but soon it becomes clear that his condition is terminal. Confronted with his diagnosis, Ivan attempts every remedy he can to obtain a cure for his worsening situation, until the pain grows so intense that he is forced to cease working and spend the remainder of his days in bed. Here, he is brought face to face with his mortality and realizes that, although he knows of it, he does not truly grasp it.
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