The emotionally restrained and delicately calibrated novels of Kazuo Ishiguro have proved both alluring and tricky for film-makers. The Nobel laureate’s work has inspired acclaimed adaptations such as The Remains of the Day, from 1993, and Never Let Me Go, from 2010, while Ishiguro himself earned plaudits for his wildly imaginative story for Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, and an Oscar nomination for Living, his adapted screenplay from 2022.
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Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills, adapted from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut, simultaneously demonstrates the plusses and pitfalls of tackling the novelist’s work. It’s a film of visual elegance and melancholic intent, yet it often feels as elusive as the memories it seeks to dramatise. No wonder it has taken so long for someone to bring the novel to the big screen.
The story moves between postwar Nagasaki in 1952 and England in 1982, following Etsuko – played with quiet fortitude by Suzu Hirose as the young wife and Yo Yoshida as the older widow – as she navigates displacement, loss and lingering trauma.
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In Nagasaki, a tentative friendship with the enigmatic Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) and her withdrawn daughter, Mariko, illuminates Etsuko’s own familial anxieties, while in England her daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) attempts to reconcile her life as a London-based journalist with the mysteries of her mother’s past. Underneath the surface, the suicide of Etsuko’s elder daughter, Keiko, haunts both timelines.
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Ishikawa’s direction imbues the film with a dreamlike quality. Piotr Niemyjski’s pointedly artificial cinematography renders Nagasaki in blinding backlights and saturated sunsets, while England’s drab countryside echoes the muted tones of regret. Hirose and Yoshida offer subtle, layered performances, but the characters often feel underwritten and unexplored.
The film soon falters in narrative cohesion. Key plot developments, including the climactic reveal, land with jolting abruptness rather than the slow-broiled realisations of Ishiguro’s prose. The dual timelines drift, leaving audiences to piece together character motivations and emotional stakes. Some subplots feel completely adrift.
The director comes seriously close to re-creating the elegiac spell of In the Mood for Love, but, unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s film, the emotional core remains frustratingly out of reach.
In cinemas from Friday, March 13th
