A PALE VIEW OF HILLS***

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.

LIVING - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 5

LIVING is a delicate, quiet, deeply affecting and faithful adaptation of Kurosawa's 1950s film Ikiru, brought to the screen by screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus.  How ironic that a Japanese-British writer and South African director should make a film that so piercingly investigates what it is to be that most English of things - an elderly, middle-class civil servant - an English "gentleman" of a certain period - perhaps epitomised by our late Queen - of English decline, of the stiff upper lip, of just getting on with it and not causing a fuss.  Then again, one could argue that this kind of investigation has been at the heart of Ishiguro's stunning oeuvre from the start, and what better writer to take an iconic Japanese film and inject it with Englishness.

Bill Nighy gives the performance of his career - the kind of award-worthy performance that makes you wonder why he wasn't offered more challenging dramatic roles decades ago - as the stiff, near silent civil servant whose entire job seems to be blocking action in a Kafka-esque byzantine bureaucracy. As Mr Williams shuffles another manilla folder into a pile on his desk his guiding principle seems to be that "it can do no harm" to rest there for a few more weeks. 

The news that Mr Williams has mere months to live jolts him into self-reflection. He attempts a seaside jaunt to live it up, being guided with care by Tom Burke's roué. But this seems out of character and tacked on. The real enlivenment comes from his relationship with a young former colleague played by SEX EDUCATION's Aimee Lou Wood in a break-out role of real warmth, honesty and gentle humour. Mr Williams envies her vitality, and unable to communicate with his son, as much of a procrastinator as his father, he confides in her, and finds the inspiration to now make what small difference he can - to actually do his job by shepherding the building of a children's playground.

The resulting film is tender, beautifully observed and shown with quite some directorial flair.  As with the best drama, it's all about what isn't said, and the pauses between the words.  There's also some excellent, dryly comic set piece passive-aggression when Mr Williams turns the bureaucracy on its head by effectively sitting and making people feel awkward. Credit to Oliver Hermanus and his team for beautifully capturing the look and feel of post-war London - not least Sandy Powell's costumes. There's real panache in the way Hermanus depicts the seaside episode in particular, set to music, with little dialogue but everything expressed in glances and responses.  This is very fine film-making indeed.

LIVING has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film has played Sundance, Telluride, Venice, San Sebastian,Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the UK on November 4th and in the USA on December 23rd.