Arash AziziWhile many at Cannes’s first two days were distracted by the mega-celebrity Tom Cruise, a superstar of a different genre graced the festival. Nobel-prize winning Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro is here for A Pale View of Hills, an adaptation by Kei Ishikawa of his debut novel which is playing in Un Certain Regard. Ishiguro wrote the novel at age 25, years before he rose to become one of the best-known novelists in the world. Speaking to the audience before the film, he joked that it was a “bad book” but he was convinced that “bad books” can make good movies.
The writer’s humility aside, the best elements of the film indeed bear the hallmark of Ishiguro. He has previously described musical worlds of rock and jazz as foundational to his literary upbringing and his characters speak like songs; not in the lyrical sense but in the way they appeal to each other’s emotions.
A Pale View of Hills moves back and forth between the London of 1980s and Nagasaki of 1950s. Its plot is driven by Niki (Camilla Aiko), a young writer in London who comes home to his Japanese mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida) in the English countryside. Urged by an editor, he pushes Etsuko to share memories of postwar Nagasaki, of obvious interest given the port city’s ominous past as a victim of an American nuclear attack. This painful past is something the mother and daughter have rarely talked about. But it’s perfect timing now as Etsuko wants to sell the house and old trinkets are turning up, each of them filled with valence and memory. Niki will even get over her hesitation and finally open the doors to the long-unused room of Keiko, Niki’s older sister who has died of suicide in forlorn and mysterious circumstances. How does Keiko’s story relate to the past is a question that doesn’t leave us (and is never really answered.)
We soon find out that Etsuko (played in her young age version by Suzu Hirose, a box-office-drawing Japanese model and actress) is not the most reliable of narrators. Entire characters shift and change in her story as the film engages in long flashbacks from the present time.
But the harrowing shadow of Nagasaki’s nuclear near-past is never far away. Etsuko strikes a friendship with Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido, Shogun) who hails from an area close to the ground zero. Her daughter carries radiation wounds and is stigmatized for them. A more direct engagement with Japan’s past comes around a side character, Etsuko’s father-in-law Ogata (Tomokazu Miura), a former teacher and a warm and gentle man with a close relationship with Etsuko. We saw a very different side of Ogata when he confronts one of his former students for a critical article he had written about Japan’s fascistic past that culminated in its alliance with the Nazis during the Second World War. The patriotic Ogata defends Japan’s choices and claims only the nuclear weapons dropped on Nagasaki made his country lose, showing how the bomb’s legacy lives on in different ways. Ogata’s strong writing is also an Ishiguro mark. In fact, the writer cared so much about the character that he helped carry it, in a reformulated fashion, into Remains of the Day, the British-set novel which won him the Booker prize and launched him into literary stardom.
These points of strength makes us forgive the lack of a strong narrative arch and the fact that the back and forth between the two time periods doesn’t always work neatly. In fact, the film’s most strong scenes come from the humane engagement, such as the mother-daughter duo of the 1980s and Etsuko’s caring for Sachiko – all of which have something to do with the novel it is based on. This is better described as a good film based on a good book. The 70-year-old Ishiguro clearly has a love for cinema and has written a few scripts, most recently Living (2022,) based an Akira Kurosawa film, for which he received an Oscars. I hope the Cannes’ bug bites him and he does more for the silver screen. We will all be better off for it.
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