Based on Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel and set in 1980s England and post-war Japan, A Pale View of Hills follows Niki, a young journalist desperate to understand her mum’s history before her birth in 1950s Nagasaki.
Spanning two timelines, and lightly excavating the author’s own family history and cultural heritage, this is an elegant, moving and hopeful account of the generational impact of war.
The Garden Cinema View:
This very decent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s beguiling debut novel doesn’t quite capture the singularly eerie nature of its source, but succeeds on its own terms as an exploration of memory, guilt, and grief. Director Kei Nishikawa (a rising star in Japan, but relatively unknown in the UK) evokes the two distinct periods (1950s Nagasaki and 1980s Hertfordshire) with impressive production design, and coaxes excellent performances from Suzu Hirose and Yō Yoshida as the younger and older Etsuko. Although certain scenes look a little too clean, and digitally sharp, Piotr Niemyjski’s cinematography is subtle and effective. The novel reaches an almost gothic sense of closure, but Nishikawa doesn’t quite match this, with narrative threads becoming muddled, and departing with a sense of confusion. Although, this is perhaps appropriate for a film so imbued with the fog of memory.
