Living

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. 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. Plot 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 slow 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 neglects to tell his son Michael and daughter-in-law, Fiona, instead opting 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 restaurant. Moved by Williams' 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.