Nobel Prize-winning, Japanese-born British writer-musician Sir Kazuo Ishiguro proved to be the big surprise at the premiere of Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. What’s more he charmed everyone with the disarming critique of his first book that came out in 1982 and on which the film is based. “It is bad. I was 25 when I wrote it,” he said, going on to talk about adapting books to films. Films might largely be infamous for not living up to the books that they are based on, but he hoped Ishikawa’s interpretation would improve on his own work. The jury, however, is still out on that.
Drawn from Ishiguro’s own experience of moving from Nagasaki to Surrey when he was five and growing up in Britain in a Japanese family, the novel, and the film, centre on Etsuko (Suzu Hirose and Yoh Yoshida, in her young and the old avtar respectively), a middle-aged Japanese woman living on her own in England, haunted by the recent death by suicide of her older daughter Keiko. Her visiting younger daughter, Niki, an aspiring writer, plans to bring out a book drawn from Etsuko’s reminiscence of post-war Nagasaki. A project spanning all the way from the ’50s Japan to the ’80s Britain.
Niki (Camilla Aiko) prompts Etsuko to go back in time to recount her memories from the time when she was an expectant mother. A chance encounter with Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) and her young daughter Mariko makes her forge new bonds beyond the immediate family of three—she, her husband Jiro (Kohei Matushita), and his father, Ogata (Tomokazu Miura). Sachiko wants to move abroad to start a new life and also constantly speaks of the presence of an eerie woman around her.
Ishikawa strikes a fine balance between two worlds in the two timelines set in two distinct eras. The Japan of the past and contemporary England get imagined and fashioned beautifully with the artistry of his production designers Adam Marshall and Hiroyuki Wagatsuma, art director James Turner, set decorator Hannah Spice and costume designers Matthew Price and Sayaka Takahashi.
The sprawling canvas that Ishikawa works on in the film is painted with the elements of enigma and pensiveness that also mark the book. There’s an overwhelming air of disquiet underlying the seemingly placid narrative and something unfathomable about an ostensibly normal, though bereaved, family. Inscrutability marks Sachiko and Etsuko’s relationship with her and Keiko’s untimely death in particular.
The many ambiguities often make things irritatingly convoluted and the acting, other than from Hirose and Yoshida, is not layered enough to deliver on the emotions, intrigues and the complexities. The act of viewing the film itself becomes all about trying to put these various pieces of the puzzle together. Ishikawa works with all of this and more in structuring the narrative and propelling it towards a closure that answers a few questions, if not all. But the curiosity doesn’t last long enough despite the overall elegance and airiness and the play of the real with the metaphorical.
Keiko is the daughter Etsuko had with her Japanese husband, Jiro, and Niki is the daughter from the British man Frank (Romain Danna) she met and moved to England with, taking Keiko along. Was that a good decision? Is there guilt in Etsuko for having forced the move on Keiko without giving a thought to whether she’d be able to reconcile with herself, her loneliness and identity issues? Is Sachiko for real or just a projection of Etsuko’s fears and nightmares?
The Japan-United Kingdom-Poland co-production is all about secrets and lies. It marries the personal with the nation’s history, the scars of the war and the bomb mirroring the individual traumas and familial turmoil in which women and children have to bear the brunt. It is also about the human movement—the migrations and exoduses that happened then, are happening now and will continue to happen in the future. Most of all it's about diversity and inclusion and the fluidities of identities and cultures. Where you come from may not always be the place you belong to and where you move to could truly be the home where the heart is. Or perhaps not.