00:00The lingering emotional effects of the bombing of Nagasaki is explored in the
00:03British-Japanese co-production A Pale View of Hills.
00:07Kamila Eiko's Niki visits her mother Etsuko, played by Yo Yoshida, in England in 1982,
00:13as she plans to sell her home after Niki's sister Keiko took her life.
00:17Niki interviews Etsuko for an article about her experiences in Nagasaki 30 years earlier,
00:22her younger self, played by Suze Hirose, who becomes drawn towards her neighbour Sachiko,
00:26played by Fumi Nakedo, and her troubled daughter Mariko.
00:30A Pale View of Hills is based on Kaza Ishiguro's 1982 debut novel,
00:34whose books The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have previously been adapted to film.
00:38He also did the screenplay for living, the remake of Kurosawa's Ikiru.
00:43Unfortunately, Ishiguro didn't write the script for this, and I wish he did,
00:46because despite writer-director Kai Ishikawa's best efforts, it has ultimately eluded him.
00:51Like the book, the film plays in two concurrent timeframes,
00:54both in the aftermath of a tragedy in the past that is still deeply felt years afterward,
01:00neither of which is explicitly seen on screen.
01:03The scenes in Nagasaki are by far the strongest, both in terms of the often strikingly beautiful
01:07cinematography, but also in terms of the performances, with Suzu Hirose's subtle
01:11performance of an unhappy woman being particularly good. This part of the film also sees Nagasaki,
01:16and Japan itself, changing and reckoning with its culture and role within the Second World War,
01:21with Etsuko and Sachiko looking at the city, and the view is almost like the bombing had never
01:26happened, and yet Sachiko and her daughter have terrible memories of it. Elsewhere, there's a
01:32prominent subplot with Tomokazu Miura playing Etsuko's father-in-law and former headmaster,
01:37who takes offense at a former pupil who criticizes his militaristic style of teaching.
01:42The problem is that Ishiguro's books, often about repressed characters, are quite
01:47delicate and difficult to adapt to film, and this shows the pitfalls, as unfortunately I was never
01:53really emotionally engaged with this adaptation, not helped by an almost glacially slow pace.
01:58The scenes in England, however, are much less successful. Despite the involvement of the
02:02production company who made Living in the Salt Path, these scenes come across as rather stiff and
02:07stilted, especially the dialogue, which is blunt and heavy-handed. They're also shot in a much
02:12flatter way in the ones in 50s Japan, even if that is somewhat deliberate, and it seems like Ishikawa
02:17has fallen victim to the perils of directing scenes in a second language, to such an extent that the
02:22two timelines feel like they were held by two different people. But the script in general also
02:27lacks focus and structure, feeling episodic and going into tangential subplots in ways that are
02:32much more suited for the page. And the ending flattens what should be a hauntingly ambiguous finish
02:37into a much more conventional twist, managing to be somehow confusing and obvious simultaneously.
02:43A pale view of Hills is wrestling with guilt, cultural identity and painful truths, but if the
02:48strongest theme that I felt after 135 minutes was simply confusion, then that shows that this has
02:54failed as an adaptation.
02:56You
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