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Talking about Ishiguro, we found ourselves watching Living yesterday afternoon- a film he scripted. Nice touch of synchronicity that!
Living is based on Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952)- very faithfully too. Turns out a besuited bureaucrat in post-war England is very like a besuited bureaucrat in post-war Japan- inhibited, repressed, locked into an unforgiving hierarchy. The man gets told he has inoperable cancer, wakes up- and cuts through the red tape to build a children's playground. Ikiru is an acknowledged classic of world cinema- and Living transposes it more than adequately.
It's unfashionably slow, with long painful scenes of people cutting through their own emotional red tape- sawing at it, as it were, with a small blunt knife- to say the things society would rather they didn't- like "I'm dying". Very Ishiguro.
"Will he die on the swing?" I kept asking myself, "Will he die on the swing like his Japanese prototype does? Will they have the chutzpah to reproduce that most haunting of cinematic images?" Well, if you haven't seen it yet I'll leave you to find out.
Oh, by the way, Bill Nighy is magnificent....
Living is based on Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952)- very faithfully too. Turns out a besuited bureaucrat in post-war England is very like a besuited bureaucrat in post-war Japan- inhibited, repressed, locked into an unforgiving hierarchy. The man gets told he has inoperable cancer, wakes up- and cuts through the red tape to build a children's playground. Ikiru is an acknowledged classic of world cinema- and Living transposes it more than adequately.
It's unfashionably slow, with long painful scenes of people cutting through their own emotional red tape- sawing at it, as it were, with a small blunt knife- to say the things society would rather they didn't- like "I'm dying". Very Ishiguro.
"Will he die on the swing?" I kept asking myself, "Will he die on the swing like his Japanese prototype does? Will they have the chutzpah to reproduce that most haunting of cinematic images?" Well, if you haven't seen it yet I'll leave you to find out.
Oh, by the way, Bill Nighy is magnificent....
