Latest news with #Etsuko
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: The Supple Ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel Stiffen and Seize Up in an Unsatisfying Adaptation
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1982 debut novel 'A Pale View of Hills' is an elegant, slippery examination of lives caught between identities both national and existential: Its tale-within-a-tale of two Japanese women living eerily overlapping lives in post-war Nagasaki, as related to the mixed-race daughter of one of them 30 years later, is rife with deliberate, subtly uncanny inconsistencies that speak of immigrant trauma and disassociation. Such lithe literary conceits turn to heavier twists in Kei Ishikawa's ambitious but ungainly adaptation, which mostly follows the letter of Ishiguro's work, but misses its haunting, haunted spirit. Attractively and accessibly presented, this bilingual Japanese-British production aims squarely for crossover arthouse appeal, and with the Ishiguro imprimatur — the Nobel laureate takes an executive producer credit — should secure broader global distribution than any of Ishikawa's previous work. Viewers unfamiliar with the novel, however, may be left perplexed by key development in this dual-timeline period piece, which strands proceedings somewhere between ghost story and elusive, unreliable memory piece; even those more au fait with the material may well query some of Ishikawa's storytelling choices. On more prosaic fronts, too, the film is patchy, with multiple subplots drifting erratically in and out of view, and an uneven quartet of central performances. More from Variety 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Ishiguro's novel was narrated firsthand by the character who bridges both its timelines. The melancholic Etsuko appears in 1952 Nagasaki as a timid, dutiful housewife (played by 'Our Little Sister' star Suzu Hirose) pregnant with her first child, and 30 years later, in Britain's genteel home counties, as a solitary widow (played by Yoh Yoshida) preparing to move from a house filled with pained memories. In between there has been a second marriage, a second pregnancy, a seismic emigration and more than one bereavement. Our access to Etsuko's inner life is limited, however, as her story is filtered through the perspective of her younger daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko), an aspiring journalist who has grown up entirely in Britain. Visiting her mother in 1982 with the intention of writing a family memoir of sorts, Niki struggles to square her westernized upbringing with a Japanese history and heritage that her mother is loath to talk about. Etsuko's reticence is partly rooted in grief: The elephant in the room between them is the recent suicide of Keiko, Etsuko's Japanese-born elder daughter and Niki's half-sister, who never adjusted, culturally or psychologically, to her new environment after emigrating with her mother and British stepfather. Keiko is never directly seen on screen, though there may be an analog of sorts for her childhood self in the film's 1950s-set section, where the young Etsuko — lonely and brusquely neglected by her workaholic husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita) — befriends single mother Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido, recently seen in FX's 'Shōgun' series) and her sullen, withdrawn pre-teen daughter Mariko. Sachiko is a glamorous, modern-minded social outcast, marginalized both for her rejection of Japanese patriarchy and the scars of her and Mariko's radiation exposure following the 1945 Nagasaki bombings. (The stigma of the latter is such that Etsuko maintains a lie to Jiro that she was not in Nagasaki at the time.) But she's planning her escape, having attached herself to an American soldier willing to sweep her and Mariko back to the States. As the two women bond, the meek Etsuko begins to wonder if this life of traditional domestic servitude is really what she was made for. Though we are never party to her early years of motherhood, nor the transition between her first and second husbands, the mirroring between these unseen, imminent life changes and Sachiko's situation grows ever clearer — as the women themselves even begin to resemble each other in costume and comportment. Is Sachiko merely a model for Etsuko to emulate, a phantom projection of what her future could be, or the older Etsuko's distanced reflection of her past? DP Piotr Niemyjski's heightened depiction of midcentury Nagasaki — sometimes a postcard vision of serene pastels, sometimes luridly bathed in saturated sunset hues — suggests some embellishment of reality, but Ishikawa never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page, building to a reveal that feels overwrought and rug-pulling. Back in Blighty, shot in drabber tones outside a flash of red maple foliage in Etsuko's lovingly maintained Japanese-style garden, the drama is more straightforward, but stilted and inert nonetheless. The script musters scant interest in Niki's career ambitions and romantic complications, and her halting conversations with her mother keep chasing a climactic point of mutual understanding that never arrives — a poignant impasse, perhaps, but a difficult one to structure a film around. There's more interest in the past, and in Hirose and Nikaido's delicate performances as two women living parallel lives in full view of each other. But 'A Pale View of Hills' commendably resists nostalgia, as it brittly sympathizes with immigrant identities unsettled in any place or any era. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: An Overly Cautious Adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Haunting Novel
In a modest home in the English countryside, a young woman rummages through her mother's belongings. Among half-packed boxes and cluttered papers, she finds an envelope of photographs. 'I've not seen many pictures of you in Nagasaki, you look so young,' Niki (Camila Aiko), a British-born Japanese writer says to her mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), before handing over one of the images. There's a brusqueness to their interaction, a brevity that hints at secrets untold. Etsuko says she hadn't intended to put the photos out and proceeds to make the bed. These kind furtive exchanges litter A Pale View of Hills, Kei Ishikawa's overly careful adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's debut novel of the same name. The film, which premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, braids together two stories. The first is set in 1980s England, where Niki helps her mother prepare to sell their house. As the two women pack up a lifetime of belongings, Niki interviews her mother about life in post-war Japan. The young writer, who recently dropped out of university and lives in London, is working on a memoir about her family and she hopes these conversations with her mother can help her understand her older sister Keiko's suicide. Working with DP Piotr Niemyjski, Ishikawa defines this timeline with cool tones — dark blues, muted greens and a gray pallor that haunts every frame. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Makes a Stunning Return to Brazilian Cinema in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Masterful Period Political Thriller 'Slauson Rec' Review: Shia LaBeouf Inspires Wannabes - and Frequently Turns on Them - in an Intimate Chronicle of His Theater Experiment Wes Anderson, Benicio Del Toro's 'The Phoenician Scheme' Cannes Premiere Draws Polite Ovation The second story takes place in Etsuko's memories, a golden-hued recollection of Nagasaki in 1950. Ishikawa transports viewers to the decade after the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb on the port city which, killed hundreds of thousands of people and exposed countless others to harmful radiation. The tone is warmer in this section, the director shaping the images from this period with a bright, almost surreal visual language. Together, these threads form a lopsided and sometimes prosaic film. Not only do the post-war Japan sequences have more resonance than the stiffer generational trauma-drama of 1980s England, but a vague sense of viewer distrust plagues this adaptation. It's almost as if Ishikawa, eager to do the source material justice, fears that inviting any ambiguity will fail the mystery propelling Ishiguro's novel. But a little uncertainty can be beneficial, especially when it comes to interpreting an author whose work is so haunting. After Etsuko shares that the stress of the move has been instigating some nightmares, Niki goads her mother into telling her some stories of life in Nagasaki. The elder woman's initial reluctance dissolves into a timid willingness as she recalls the cautious optimism saturating the city after the bomb. In those post-war years, Etsuko (now played by Suzu Hirose, Our Little Sister) and her husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), a prickly man whose long hours at work make him both cranky and distant, are expecting their first child. Their relatively quiet life undergoes dramatic changes when Jiro's father Ogata (Tomokazu Miura, Perfect Days) comes for an extended stay and Etsuko meets Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido of Shogun), a single mother who lives in a run-down cottage nearby. The presence of both figures challenges Etsuko to confront the painful legacy of World War II as well as the role women played in post-war society. In Ogata, the expectant mother begins to understand why a younger generation feels betrayed by their elders, whom they accuse of leading them to war because of blind faith in imperialism. And through Sachiko, Etsuko expands her sense of who a Japanese woman can be in and beyond Nagasaki. Sachiko harbors dreams of leaving the city with her daughter Mariko, a solitary and malcontent child who she believes might thrive with some distance from Japan. When she meets a white American soldier named Frank, who offers to take her overseas, these dreams seem closer to becoming reality. One of the underlying mysteries fueling Ishiguro's novel revolves around the strange relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. The two women, as recalled by Etsuko, can come off eerily similar and some critics have posited that one might be a projection of the other. Part of the thrill of Ishiguro's novel is in how ambiguous the writer leaves this; the text offers clues, but few solid answers. That intentional inscrutability makes the book excitingly capricious, reflecting how nations remember or untangle painful ruptures in their history. Ishikawa, who in addition to directing and editing A Pale View of Hills also wrote the screenplay, is most confident with the Nagasaki timeline, which conforms to a conventional family drama. It's when Ishikawa must interweave and balance that timeline with the one in England that the director struggles a bit more. The impact of A Pale View of Hills is blunted by a tendency to over-explain and flatten. Still, there are some highlights, including the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. The chemistry between Hirose and Nikaido makes their performances compelling to watch and amplifies the intriguing elements within their characters' friendships. Those strengths coupled with Ishiguro's popularity mean that, despite its shortcomings, A Pale View of Hills could find some stateside success. 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The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I had a chance to pass my mum's story on': Kazuo Ishiguro on growing up in shadow of the Nagasaki bomb
Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then; he is 70 now. 'I had no idea that the book would be published, let alone that I had a career ahead of me as a writer,' he says. '[But] the story remains an important part of me, not only because it was the start of my novel-writing life, but because it helped settle my relationship with Japan.' First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, 'Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?' In awarding Ishiguro the Nobel prize for literature in 2017, the Swedish Academy paid tribute to the emotional force of his prose and his focus on 'memory, time and self-delusion'. These are the themes that colour all his fiction, whether he is writing about the below-stairs staff at a stately home (The Remains of the Day), sacrificial children at an elite boarding school (Never Let Me Go) or aged wanderers in Arthurian Britain (The Buried Giant), although they seem closest to home in A Pale View of Hills. The story lightly excavates the author's family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five. Fittingly, the movie version premieres at the Cannes film festival, where it risks getting lost amid the palm trees, yachts and bling. Cultural dislocation, in large part, is what the tale is about. I'm tempted to view Niki – the bumptious young writer from whom no family secret is safe – as Ishiguro's alter ego. Actually, he says, she was conceived as 'more a 'reader proxy' than a writer one'. She's our entry point to the story; possibly our red thread through the maze. It's hard to believe today, he adds, but most contemporary British readers were resistant to Japanese stories and characters and needed a reassuring western presence to help ease them in. Niki is played in the film by Camilla Aiko, a recent graduate of the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. She sees the character as the story's truth-seeker, the eyes of the audience, and the picture itself as the tale of two women who struggle to connect. 'It didn't cross my mind – maybe it should have – that I was playing Ishiguro,' she says. What she shares with the author is the same blended cultural heritage. Aiko is British mixed-race – her mother is Japanese. 'And the thing about being mixed-race is that I find it difficult speaking for Japanese people or British people because I'm not sure which side I'm on. In Japan I'm a foreigner; here I'm Asian. As an actor I'm someone who tries to slip through the cracks.' Niki isn't Ishiguro. Nonetheless, the author admits that there are parallels. He says, 'Where I see myself in Niki – and I was reminded of this watching Camilla Aiko's fine performance – is in her sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes coy and cunning curiosity when coaxing memories from her mother of another, more troubled time.' It is the mother, after all, who looms largest in the tale. Etsuko in a sense has led two lives and been two different people. In 80s England she is a respectable widowed music teacher. In Nagasaki seven years after the atomic bomb dropped, she's a harried young bride, contaminated with radiation and a potential hazard to her unborn child. She needs a friend or an escape route, whichever comes first. But she is never an entirely reliable narrator – and the family story she tells Niki finally doesn't add up. What did Ishiguro's own mother make of A Pale View of Hills? 'I believe it remained special to her among my books,' he says. 'A little before I started the book, with cold war tensions intensifying in the Reagan-Brezhnev era, she said to me she felt it was important she should relate to me some of her experiences in Nagasaki. Partly because I was of the next generation, but also because I was wanting to be a writer and had a chance to pass things on … A Pale View of Hills didn't use any of her stories directly, but I think she thought the book was some sort of evolution of them, and closer to her than the books I wrote later.' Ishiguro's mother died in 2019, aged 92. After watching Ishikawa's adaptation, he thought: 'What a pity she wasn't here to see this film.' Cinema is an enduring passion for Ishiguro and influences his writing as much as literature does. His favourite recent films include the Oscar-winning animation Flow, about a small soot-grey cat who survives a great flood, plus the French legal dramas Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer ('Is French justice really conducted like this? Or are these hallucinatory versions of French courts?'). A few years back, between novels, he wrote the screenplay for Living – a quietly wrenching adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 classic Ikiru, relocated to London and starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood. The poster for Ikiru, incidentally, can be glimpsed on the street in A Pale View of Hills. Loving film can be a double-edged sword. Is it a help or a hindrance when it comes to having his own work adapted? Hopefully the former, Ishiguro says, so long as he maintains a safe distance. 'I have a strict rule not to attempt to adapt any of my novels myself,' adds the writer, who is speaking to me by email. 'As long as I keep well in the background, I don't think I'm necessarily a hindrance. I always emphasise to film-makers that they have to own the film – that it shouldn't be approached reverentially.' Merchant-Ivory managed a near perfect adaptation of The Remains of the Day. Mark Romanek and Alex Garland crafted an appropriately haunting, chilly version of Never Let Me Go. Both films preserve Ishiguro's distinctive style and flavour. The restraint and simplicity; the sense of deep mystery. Both, though, remain films first and foremost. They have been allowed to migrate and adapt to a new habitat. 'This is personal to me,' he says, 'but I lean toward the film version moving the story on – not being a faithful translation the way a foreign language edition of a book might be. I know many novelists who'd be annoyed to hear me say this … The thing is, I watch many, many films and when an adaptation of a well-known book doesn't work, 95% of the time it's because the film-makers have been too reverential to the source.' Books and films are very different, he thinks. 'They're sometimes almost antithetical.' In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko hands her story on to Niki. Niki, in turn, will write it up how she likes. So this is a family story about family stories, aware of how they warp and change in the telling. Every tale is subject to the same cultural static. They are adapted and extrapolated, lost and found in translation. One might even say that's what keeps a story alive. 'The other thing,' Ishiguro says. 'It might sound like modesty when I encourage film adaptations to 'move on' the story. But actually it's a form of egomania. I have aspirations for my stories to be like those of, say, Homer. Or to become like certain fairytales and myths, moving through the centuries and varying cultures, adapting and growing to speak to different audiences. My novels are themselves made up of materials I've inherited, imbibed and remoulded. When something goes from book to film it's a campfire opportunity: it's when the story should grow and evolve.' A Pale View of Hills premieres at the Cannes film festival on 15 May
