Kazuo Ishiguro has long been a subtle and potent figure in the movies, with his distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation of The Remains of the Day for director James Ivory was a heart-rending study in regret; Alex Garland and Mark Romanek’s treatment of science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go was an excursion into strangeness and sadness and, as a screenwriter himself, Ishiguro’s script for Living, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, was a wonderful transformation.
But A Pale View of Hills, adapted by Japanese writer-director Kei Ishikawa from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, is somehow frustrating and disappointing. It is a bland, soggy film whose contrived and anticlimactic surprise ending is not delivered with a clear satisfying twist and, for me, undermines our expectations of what we thought we would be told about the emotional truth of the main character and her life story.
It takes place in two time strands: one is England in the 1980s, where Etsuko (Yo Yoshida) is an expatriate Japanese widow in late middle-age, whose grownup journalist daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) has had to live with the memory of her older half-sister Keiko – that is, Etsuko’s older daughter – taking her own life. Etsuko has always told Niki that she left her husband in Japan to be with a foreigner and they came to England with Keiko. Niki was born in England later.
The second “flashback” narrative strand is Nagasaki in the 1950s, a place recovering, or not recovering, from the trauma of the atomic bomb; here the landscapes are nicely rendered, and the two movies showing at a local cinema: Ozu’s The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice and Kurosawa’s To Live, hint at the stylistic influences. Suzu Hirose plays a young pregnant woman, discontented with her boorish young salaryman husband whose father has come to stay; he is a pompous retired schoolteacher who tells her to call him “Mr Ogata” and is enraged by a magazine article written by a former pupil who denounces him for perpetrating the reckless, reactionary ideology that led to Pearl Harbor. But she is fascinated by a single-mum neighbour, Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) who is planning to leave Japan for the US with her American boyfriend.
Once the ending is revealed, some of the apparently pointless and irrelevant narrative finally makes retrospective sense, although you can spend a great deal of this film wondering if we will be told more about Keiko’s adult life and the terrible depression that led to her suicide. Exasperatingly, this massive event is only glancingly alluded to, and you could be forgiven for wondering why Etsuko’s own story could not have been told straight. It is not a clear view.
• A Pale View of Hills is in UK and Irish cinemas from 13 March.
