Living

Last week, one of our rare visits to the cinema, to the Epsom Odeon to see a film called 'Living' involving Oliver Hermanus, Kazuo Ishiguro and Bill Nighy. A film which BH had somehow got to hear about.

An Epsom Odeon which seems to have been expensively refurbished since we were last there, with fancy seats and lots of leg room. But fancy seats which were not quite the right size for me and I would have been better off in an old style cinema seat. But one got a good view of the screen, even if it took me some minutes to adjust to sound seeming to be coming out of the walls and the ceiling. 

The film came with what seemed to me to be a rather retro wrapping, presumably part of taking us back to the early 1950's when the story was set. But very up-to-minute credits at the end which included a full COVID team. Presumably in charge of disinfectants and protective clothing.

The film was largely set in County Hall, despite the workers therein appearing to cross Westminster Bridge on their way to work from Waterloo Station. And as a former civil servant, while I recognised some of what goes on in the film, I was rather irritated by this caricature of public service. In fact, I found the whole film rather tiresome until Nighy died, was buried and reappeared in various flashbacks. For me, this second half of the film was much more successful; moving even. A small cog in a large machine achieved success with a small playground in bombed out Stepney. A success despite the many bureaucratic barriers in its way. A success despite the likelihood that the playground would be swept away in some future round of redevelopment.

To our left we had a couple of ladies out for the afternoon who found it hard to stop talking and laughing. One wondered what they were doing there at all. A warm place to natter? There could not have been more than a dozen or so of us altogether, so one hoped that Odeon did better with their other films, later in the day. This particular film rating just one showing a day at the unseasonably early hour of 12:45. Clearly and rightly not thought to be everybody's cup of tea. 

But I did notice that there was a lot of fantasy on offer. Perhaps the equivalent of the horror films of our younger days in the late 1960's? Perhaps without quite so many busty maidens heaving under Dracula's knife. Or perhaps I should say teeth.

Out for cake etc at the Persian establishment now occupying what used to be Caspars, across the road from the cinema. BH thought Christian Persians, possibly the persecuted Christians whom I came across earlier in the year on Westminster Bridge, noticed at reference 6 and who still send me emails from time to time. A rather good baklava by way of cake, latte for her and Johnny Walker for him. Gold label, in a rather dubious bottle, was too near empty, so I settled for black label. The bottle in question was the sort shown top left and looked a bit lurid in the light in question, but perhaps thought more suitable for a restaurant which sold cocktails, than one of the regular bottles right.

An establishment which we knew in a former life as Caspar's, noticed in 2014 at reference 5. But it must have been some years before that that we used the place, possibly as much as twenty years ago. Dining out has not been the same in Epsom since.

Antecedents

Wikipedia tells me that the filmscript was written by the entirely respectable Kazuo Ishiguro, an English writer who happens to have been born in Nagasaki. We have, at least in the past, owned at least one of his novels, 'An Artist of the Floating World' and we have seen one of his films 'The Remains of the Day'. We may still own the DVD, despite the chuck-out on the arrival of the smart television.

Based on the Japanese film 'Ikuru' which I am fairly sure we have not seen.

Loosely based in turn on the Tolstoy novella 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', a novella which I have read in the past and still own a copy, No.432 from the small blue, hardback series of 'The World's Classics' from OUP, published in 1935 and quite possibly my father's copy - from the days when the Soviet Union was a good thing, at least to those of the left. A few years before it became a good thing for everybody else for being mainly responsible for defeating Hitler.

A story which I remember as being a story about how a painful, terminal illness made the patient such a pain to be with, that all his friends and acquaintances gradually dropped off, to the point that when he finally died, he was more or less alone. A memory which does not seem to have much connection with the present film at all. However, I have put my hand on the book again and I hope to reread the novella over the next few days. We shall see if memory is playing me false yet again.

PS: some time later: now whizzed through the story, all 73 small pages of it, and memory does seem to have been fairly defective. The novella is about a senior civil servant (legal variety), with wife and children, some deceased, who contracts an unpleasant disease in his middle years and suffers a lonely, protracted, undignified and painful death. A novella about dying, the subjective experience and the way that those around death react to it. All rather depressing - although there is some comfort to be had from the better treatment options available well over a century later. So not like the film at all and not much like my memory of it. Not lonely because everyone deserted him, but lonely because almost no-one could be honest, kind and natural about it.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_(2022_film). 2022.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru. 1952.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich. 1886.

Reference 4: The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy - 1886.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/12/chateaubriant.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/sweded.html.