Living

dir: Oliver Hermanus

2022

Living, in case you ever needed to know, is actually a remake of an Akira Kurosawa flick called Ikiru, which at the time was translated as “To Live”. It was based on a Tolstoy novella called The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is nothing like either of the films referred to.

And yet why did I refer to it? Because. I can be a pretentious fuck sometimes.

But none of that matters now. They brought on board that supreme cataloguer of British classism, emotional repression and regret, being Kazuo Ishiguro, to update the story from 1950s Japan to 1960s London. And instead of a dying Japanese bureaucrat realising how pointless his life has been, we have Bill Nighy playing a bureaucrat who lives to make sure nothing ever gets done or ever progresses, until he has very little life left.

I sound off and mansplain crap all the time, and think I know about a bunch of things. I know very little, I’ll grant you. There are so many things that I am so ignorant of.

But I can tell you one thing for free, one thing that is absolutely true, one thing that makes me very much appreciate both of these films keenly, in a way most people would barely ever approach.

I assure you, dear reader, I know plenty about bureaucracy.

The life of a bureaucrat, a cursed thing, to be sure, is only a stand in for these authors, screenwriters and filmmakers, for people who have squandered their lives. None of these people really know what it’s like to be a bureaucrat. They know what it’s like to be the victim of bureaucracies, but not the dark art of the other side of things.

To really grasp the supreme pointlessness of these people depicted, honestly, as good as these flicks are at showing the abject soullessness, the malicious pleasure derived from thwarting the hopes and dreams of others, well, they still barely scrape the surface to reveal the horrifying void beneath.

The difference is that the person these flicks both fixate on, are both the exemplification of these people, and the ones who, through dint of miracle or random mutation, realise before it’s too late just how worthless their lives have been, AND, most importantly, decide to do something about it.

Which, let’s be honest, is crap. It’s total crap. Someone who has wasted their life very busily not doing anything or allowing anything to happen, passionately and deliberately not living, can’t make up for anything with one supreme gesture, one grand achievement to undo their whole legacy.

These people… which is the true version of them? Before Mr Williams (Nighy) gets his terminal diagnosis, he mechanically goes through his days, ‘working’ as he does at the public / civil works area of a London council. The vertical piles of files are a testament to the importance of the officeholder, on the desks that this team of evildoers share. There are mostly old people in the office, none older than Williams, and some young people as well, including the new starter Mr Wakeling (Alex Sharp), who is, like everyone on their first day, idealistic and optimistic.

Such an office, though, such a place is where hope goes to die. It’s a mockery of humanity. A group of concerned and dedicated women have been attending these offices for months, trying to get the council to decontaminate a polluted block of land next to their community, with the hope that this unseemly vermin-ridden plot can be converted into a modest playground for their kids.

With barely disguised contempt, the ladies are of course told they need some other form signed, stamped and notarised by someone else in a different office on a different floor in the same building.

This endless charade, this sardonic waltz: every person involved in it, except for the women, except for young Mr Wakeling, who doesn’t yet realise the joke, knows what pointless cog work they are doing in the infernal machine.

And why are they doing this? Not the ladies, who are asking for very little for a slightly less awful life in the slums, we understand their motivation.

What is the motivation of the people who play the music and keep the dance going, sending them places they know will progress nothing, asking for forms for things they never intend to approve?

Who can say. In order to be able to live with themselves, you’d think they’d have to rationalise what they’re doing as contributing to some kind of “greater good”. But who could watch this and see countless bureaucrats politely divert these women all over the building, knowing full well that the end result is to get them to give up, crushed by the futility of their efforts banging against an immovable wall.

So, at the end of this pointless day, nothing have been achieved by anyone, and yet they’ve all contributed together productively and worked a full day?

This is madness. Inhuman, monstrous madness. The legions of hell wouldn’t comport themselves so brazenly.

The bigger question never answered by any of these types of stories, where someone learns the error of their ways due to mortality, is what prevented the doofus in question from realising how awful things were 30 years ago before they settled into their rut and never varied from it. The awfulness of the bureaucratic life, well, it’s obvious to anyone right from the start.

If you think I’m exaggerating about bureaucratic evil, have a look at any of the testimonies at the Royal Commission into the so-called “Robodebt” scheme going on at the moment. A scheme in which a method the government knew was not legal was used to generate so-called debts, on letters put together by consultant psychologists to terrify the receivers into paying up debts they couldn’t dispute through a system that deliberately couldn’t take queries or complaints, with phone lines that deliberately weren’t staffed. If people called they were told to email; if they emailed they were told to call. If they did both too often they were told to turn up in person. If they turned up in person they were told to book an appointment. On line. From home. Or that the office was closed due to, uh, reasons.

All of that stuff required the compliance not just of the poor suckers who got fleeced, or the ones who were terrified malevolently into taking their own lives, but of thousands of public servants at the Departments of Human Services and Social Security who put it in place and kept it running.

Every single one of them continued being paid, got their salary progressions, most of them would have been found “effective” on their annual performance reviews, and many would refer to their successful implementation of the scheme as reasons for why they deserve promotions elsewhere or internally.

Not one of them lost their jobs for doing what they did. From top to bottom, everyone was following orders and no-one is to blame.

Doesn’t it make you want to set fire to everything?

After Mr Wiliiams’ cruel and pointless day crushing people’s dreams, he finds out he’s fucked. Oh, and now he sees..

He can’t tell his son or his jerk daughter-in-law what’s going on; they’re jerks. He can’t tell the other monsters at work: they’re monsters. He can’t keep inflicting cruelties at work: he’s lost his taste for evil now that he’s dying and he’s worried about damnation.

They try to grasp at life – maybe hedonism: booze, drugs, sex, maybe they can help. Nah – not at that age. Williams lost his lust for life ages ago. But in the young he does still see something (being youth), and is attracted to it (not sexually, thank fuck).

A young woman who worked in his office but left, deciding she no longer wanted to live so pointlessly, becomes his focal point, but really he’s just hanging out with a woman 50 years his junior so he can cling to something for a little while longer. For her part Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) is nothing special, nothing exemplary, but she has a radiant smile, and life hasn’t crushed her spirit yet. Well, people like Williams haven’t crushed the life out of her yet.

She tells Williams that she had nicknames for everyone in the office before she left, so inevitably she has to tell him that to her he was always Mr Zombie; a breathless creature more dead than alive.

And, yeah, that’s what he’s been like, well before his diagnosis, and he realises the truth of it, and it shames him, deeply, which is expressed with an even breathier whisper, and maybe a minute sinking further of a crease on his forehead.

Also, there is no solution to this. Miss Harris is the only one he tells about his impending doom, and even then though it moves him to a tear or two, as she frets about the unseemly appearance of a girl her age being seen in public with a widower his age, there’s nothing to be done, and he can cling to her no longer.

Unless…? No, that wouldn’t work. But what about…Nup, not that either.

With a desperate energy he launches into the opposite of the anti-work he’s been doing for 40 years, and decides that he will make the playground happen even and especially if it kills him. He undoes all of the Gordian knots, circumvents all the steps intended to block every request from a working class area of London, and even has to abase himself and beg some Lord for the playground to proceed. The lord in question, Sir James, approves it more from disgust, and to cease the profound embarrassment he feels watching a man exhibiting human emotions.

He even had to do THAT. And then he’s gone.

I know that psychologically and philosophically, crowd pleasing stuff like this is pretty weak. Such glib, easy answers, such easy solutions to such complicated and fundamental questions, and yet…

I did so enjoy this flick. Knowing it as well as I do, considering how similar it is to Ikiru, I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Sure, Bill Nighy can and does play roles like this in his sleep, but I thought he was wonderful. And how he surprised me with his singing, oh my stars… When he asks a musician to play The Rowan Tree, and sings so beautifully, oh, my heart did soar.

It's very well made, the supreme horridness of Britishness is put on display for us all to marvel at and abjure, and hopefully reject; the acting is spot on, and I very much delighted in the acting by the youngsters playing Miss Harris and Mr Wakeling, who we have some hope at least that they’ll do something completely different with their lives, or at least live life differently than our “hero”, except for maybe his last heroic moments.

Living. It’s not easy. But it beats dying, most of the time.

8 times so many people living such lives of quiet desperation out of 10

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“Should there come days when it's no longer clear to you to what end you are directing your daily efforts, when the sheer grind of it all threatens to reduce you to the kind of state in which I so long existed, I urge you then to recall our little playground and the modest satisfaction that became our due upon its completion.” – such bureaucratic poetry - Living