Head of Division at the Office of Public Works in London, Mr. Williams leads a dull existence. At work, however, there is a lot to do, since eight years after the end of the Second World War, the city is still rebuilding itself. In fact, civil servants are overwhelmed and willingly transfer responsibility for this or that file. And the orphan requests piling up on the desks of each other… But now, on the announcement of his approaching death, Mr. Williams suddenly emerges from his existential torpor. Rather than dying as he lived, “by hiding quickly”, as Brassens sang, he will take advantage of his last months here below to improve things. In the aptly named Living (Live), Bill Nighy recalls what a prodigious actor he is.
Moreover, we can only rejoice that the English star had won an Oscar nomination for this masterful composition, undoubtedly the most felt of a career as long as it is diversified: see Love Actually(Really love), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Welcome to Marigold Hotel), the saga Pirates of the Caribbean (Pirates of the Caribbean), pride (Pride. An unlikely meeting)… At first restrained, his Williams gradually lets emerge a humanity long hidden behind a façade of placid civility.
Mr. Williams is the image of those proverbial still waters under the surface of which bubble powerful eddies.
The movie is a remake ofIkiruby Akira Kurosawa, which was freely adapted from a short story by Tolstoy, The death of Ivan Ilyich. It is none other than Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who signs the screenplay for Living.
A scenario, in this case, of infinite sensitivity, acuity and accuracy. And for good reason, as he told us in an interview: he had been carrying this project almost since childhood. “I grew up with the original, which I first saw when I was 11. It immediately became a very important film for me, because it was unusual then to see Japanese films in England. At the time, I went to school every morning by train, and I passed all these office workers […] For years, I believed that one day I would trade my school uniform for their uniform. »
No one is an island
As in his novel The Remains of the Day (The remnants of the day, Booker Prize), Ishiguro first introduces his protagonist through the latter’s profession. A profession which consists, in the description given by the author, of a series of rituals. Like butler Stevens watching the grain in a mansion, Williams leads his small team of servants by repeating the same gestures and words over and over again, day after day.
However, these rituals are nothing but a shell, a protective mechanism: if we withdraw from the world, then the world cannot harm us. But is this a life? In other words, if no one is able to reach us, knows us, or is even aware of our existence, do we really exist?
This is how, faced with the imminence of his end, Williams will join his fellow men, join the living, if only briefly. One day, instead of sending a request to gather dust, he decides to take responsibility for it and see it through. The object? The construction of a children’s park on ruined land to be decontaminated, in a disadvantaged neighborhood.
In perfect tune
Thanks to the virtuoso staging of Oliver Hermanus, the routine of Williams takes on the air of a ballet (the civil servants on the station platform, at the beginning, seem straight out of a painting by Magritte with their raincoats and their bowler hats).
Moreover, still on the subject of the realization, the South African filmmaker remains in perfect tune with the character. In that the camera initially keeps its distance from Williams (who does the same himself), to approach him better as the latter opens up to the world, belatedly.
Noted with his previous four films, especially the remarkable Moffie, in 2019, on the forbidden love between two soldiers during apartheid, Oliver Hermanus is here in complete control: each composition, each camera movement seduces and transports without ever being ostentatious (a thousand bravos to the director of photography, James D. Ramsay , an assiduous collaborator). Ditto for the music composed by the French pianist Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch: a marvel of subtle evocation.
However, and at the risk of insisting, it is really Bill Nighy who makes Living a work as poignant as it is essential.