Writer-director-editor Kei Ishikawa has finally brought a version of Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel to screen, nearly 50 years after it was first published. It's a story about generational trauma and conscious and subconscious dissembling through memory.
The primary expression of this is through the character of Etsuko (the word "character" used advisedly here.) In the early 1950s she is a submissive pregnant housewife recovering from the trauma of having survived Nagasaki. Her husband is a typical salaryman, but she seems to have a fondness for her father-in-law. She is attracted to the strength and radical modernity of a woman called Sachiko - also a Nagasaki survivor, and single-mother to her young daughter Machiko. Sachiko dreams of escaping to America with her lover Frank - a dream that Etsuko may or may not believe in. Both women are trapped and seeking escape. Friendship with Sachiko encourages Etsuko to be braver. Both suffer from prejudice, trauma and fear. Nagasaki survivors are seen as tarnished and damaged: and perhaps contagious.
The secondary expression of the theme of confronting the past and one's own role in it, is played out in the story of Etsuko's father-in-law. He seems like a lonely old man desperate to reconnect with his son Jiro. But in reality he is visiting Etsuko and Jiro to facilitate a confrontation with an ex-pupil, now teacher, who denounced the father as a nationalist who preached propaganda in the classroom. As the ex-pupil says - Japan has changed - it's a brave new world - and everyone must change with it.
Just how far they have indeed changed, and own that change, or whether that change is authentic or appropriated, is part of the slipperiness and puzzle-aspect of the film. I really enjoyed seeing the characters in the Japanese setting, even though the pace of the first hour of the film was too slow for me. The cinematography and production design are beautiful, with some lovely tableaux. I also love how the small-town feel contrasts with the forbidden dangerous wild grassland across the river, cordoned off because of nuclear contamination. This is a world where conventional bourgeois life lives knowingly and perhaps dangerously right alongside danger.
Where I thought the film suffered was in its early 80s framing device. A now widowed Etsuko, having settled in Britain, is selling the family home. Her daughter Niki is an aspiring journalist, and thinks that the personal story of her mother's experience of Nagasaki will make for a good story. But this too is a ruse. She wants to know her family history and this is a means to coax it from her reluctant mother.
The film gave me a lot to think about and I really loved some of the performances. Suzu Hirose and Fumi Nakaido as young Estuko and Sachiko are superb. But I really didn't like the framing device and found both the dialogue and performances of Camilla Aiko as Niki and Yo Yoshida as the elder Etsuko stilted and uninvolving.
A PALE VIEW OF HILLS played Cannes Toronto and London 2025. It will be released in the UK on March 13th. It has a running time of 132 minutes.
