By Robert Koehler

Published in Cinema Scope #90 (Spring 2022)

Living, Ishiguro Kazuo’s adaptation of Kurosawa Akira, Hashimoto Shinobu, and Oguni Hideo’s screenplay for Ikiru (1952), is the author’s finest script in English in several years. This isn’t to slight the contribution of director Oliver Hermanus (making his first UK-set feature after a string of respected South African films, including Moffie [2019], Endless River [2015], and Beauty [2011]), whose steady control of the narrative’s complex elements is a marvel in itself—not least his direction of Bill Nighy, who indisputably delivers his greatest and most sublime performance in a career distinguished by mostly comic roles. But Living is above all a work of dramatic writing at the highest level, as well as a master class in how to adapt—and improve!—a fine original screenplay from one cultural setting to another. 

While watching Living, I was reeling back to memories of seeing Ikiru several years ago and sensing that Ishiguro was changing and shifting aspects of the earlier screenplay while remaining rigorously faithful to the general structure and almost all of the specific sequences and scenes, which was confirmed by a subsequent viewing of Ikiru. Ishiguro closely tracks the original but then creates fresh pathways for the existential adventure of a London civil bureaucrat, Williams (Nighy), who learns that he’s dying of cancer and struggles to find some meaning and purpose in his final months. Just one example demonstrates Ishiguro’s storytelling genius. In Kurosawa’s version, the bureaucrat’s funeral becomes a marathon sequence in which the mourners reassess everything they know about him; Ishiguro dispenses with this massive block of material—for practical and cultural purposes, since the processes of British and Japanese funerals are worlds apart—for a more fractured, suspenseful set of scenes that gradually reveal each character’s inner truths.

Such fracturing is a characteristic of Ishiguro’s fiction, which tends to be driven by character revelations, thus making him the ideal adapter of Ikiru, not least due to his precise comprehension of British and Japanese cultural sensibilities. His adaptation manages the difficult balancing act of being respectful to Kurosawa’s story and themes while compressing the action, opening up the drama’s physical space, and, most importantly, removing the many times in Ikiru in which characters state the obvious in blunt terms for the viewer’s benefit. Ishiguro actually manages to make an already subtle, quiet drama even subtler, and more emotional. Sadness, inside a story of how a single man changes the course of his remaining days, has rarely been expressed with such grace and beauty.