Oliver Hermanus’s Living Is the Best of Sundance So Far

In this year’s Sundance Festival slate, one narrative feature stands out as something of a surprise. British-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has teamed with South African director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) for Living, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s tender 1952 film Ikiru starring Bill Nighy as a spiritually comatose widower and civil servant pushing paper nearly into oblivion in 1950s London.

Mr. Williams, as he is called by nearly everyone except his older son—who, along with his wife, impatiently calls him Dad—is suddenly on the verge of death from stomach cancer. His interactions bloom at first haphazardly and then more determinedly from this devastating revelation.

It’s hard to know what to expect of such a film, which Hermanus himself admitted in a short pre-screening speech is quite a departure for him. The director’s other films, including Moffie, Beauty, and The Endless River, are more overtly political and personally located, bound in undeniable colonial frameworks that shape South African histories marked by racialized tensions and oppressions. Living, on the other hand, focuses on the internally felt disintegration of a primarily white, middle class British mythology, though it was directed and written by two non-white people

Apart from Kurosawa’s film, from which Hermanus takes themes and motifs but not the same style or social context, there is another major work called Living, also set in 20th century Britain: Henry Green’s 1929 novel, which takes place during the post-war period in which Mr. Williams would have grown up. Like the film, the novel examines the workings and deceptions of British social mores. But while the film is focused on upwardly mobile middle class patriarchs, the book is more focused on the status quo’s strain on the working class; its title works as a kind of synonym for getting on, or achieving some kind of life through work. In Living, the film, Mr. William tells his young employee Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood, with a gracious and heartfelt performance to match Nighy’s) that when he was a boy, he would see the gentlemen lined up at the train station waiting to go to work; he hoped to become one of them. It’s implied that his station, managing the Public Works department at London County Hall, has been a step up for him in terms of class.

Green himself came from a decidedly elite class background and dropped out of Oxford to work as a manager at his family’s factory, where he made the observations he’d record in his novel. This proximity, mixed with Green’s literary affinity, makes the otherwise banal accounts of factory life in the book come wildly alive, through a twisty and at times extravagant use of language.

“Living,” in the context of both the new film and Kurosawa’s Ikiru (literally translatable as “to live” in Japanese), is a subversive act—an outright refusal of the status quo by white collar working men who have long benefited if not spiritually, then financially from it. Abandon and stubbornness become the dominant moods as Mr. Williams casts away a lifeless drive towards status and stability while death looms just overhead. Yet the language of the film is found not in the thoughtfully restrained dialogue Ishiguro has written—which accurately reflects the collective repression of polite British society—but in the images Hermanus, cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, and editor Chris Wyatt have constructed, in collaboration with production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Sandy Powell.

It’s in these images that Living the film enters a stylistic kinship with Living the novel. Hermanus opens the action from the point of view of another of Mr. Williams’ employees, the newly hired Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp), who quickly learns that expressiveness and conviviality are not generally tolerated by his male colleagues. At the beginning of the film, the camera hews to the nape of Wakeling’s neck, which slopes up into a black bowler hat, resembling the same hats his colleagues wear. Only after some awkward exchanges between these men on the train do we finally catch a first glimpse of the boss, Mr. Williams, with his own black bowler, through their train car’s window; he does not join them. Shot on film, Living’s images don’t align with a nostalgic view of the period, but push up against the idea of a pristine outer appearance—similarly to the way film is used by director (and, in this case, cinematographer) Paul Thomas Anderson in another mid-century period film set in London, Phantom Thread.

And both Livings, as well as Ikiru, are interested in the outsider status of women. In the film, the warmth, cheerfulness, and hospitality of Margaret (the character Toyo in Ikiru) draw Mr. Williams out of a jovial yet nihilistic experience with a stranger called Sutherland (The Souvenir Part I breakout Tom Burke). Margaret is cleverly disruptive in the office, offering tongue-in-cheek advice to Wakeling and openly teasing and challenging the other, stiff-upper-lipped men. In both the Kurosawa and Hermanus films, it’s a group of working class women from the city who relentlessly demand that their courtyard, filled with sewage and other hazardous materials, be cleaned out by the public works department and replaced with a playground for the children. In Green’s novel, a young woman named Lily Gates tries to elope with a factory worker, her future depending on the decisions made by the men around her.