Living

Mortality and morbidity have darkened these days, though not unexpectedly in the winter of one’s life. Movies seem also to dwell on this season of death and dying. It is as if cinema and the documentary of my life are indistinguishable. Breaking news can break one’s heart and personal messages even more so.   This year’s crop of films comprises various takes on soullessness, carnage and abuse of power. The pharmacist in me calls for a remedial prescription, a tonic against toxicity; not the schmaltz of the Spielberg’s Fabelmans but the slow-paced redemption in the character embodied by Bill Nighy in the film, Living.   Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, this American adaptation of Kurosawa’s 1952 movie,  Ikiru, strikes the perfect note to lift us out of the morass. We are presented with a 1950’s British bureaucrat who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Yet he is already half dead not from disease but from ennui.   How he comes to life is a thing of beauty, a kind of human rhapsody. The journey is registered on Nighy’s face — the folly and the stumbles, then the fugue of awakening.   He is helped back to life by the presence of a young woman, formerly one of his workers. As an outsider, she transcends the mind-numbing life ahead. which the men cannot see. Her instinctual compassion and vitality touches Nighy. Through her presence he glimpses his own unlived life. Her open heartedness allows him to share his fate with her. We witness an animation coming to his eyes as he rouses his staff from their zombie-like existence.   The four men with their bowler hats on the train are closely positioned just as they live out their claustrophobic existence in the same proximity in the office. Their physical closeness can be contrasted with an emotional distancing. Constraint and indifference are the unwritten code of behavior. Stacks of scrupulously unread projects pile up on their desks as a marker of their own unexamined lives.   The trigger for the plot is introduced early on. It took a group of women with the vision of converting a bombsite into a playground. The feminine principle was displayed as if swords were bent into plowshares.   When Mr. Williams (Nighy) exerts his will and pushes through the stultifying system with its other somnambulant civil servants, we cheer silently. And when his legacy is actualized, it is accompanied by the artistry of the cinematographer coming together with the music and framing of the man. We see a boy-like old man on a swing of his own making. The effect is the restoration of humanity and its possibilities. What had been lost has ­been returned to us.