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.
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.
