Director – Kei Ishikawa – 2025 – UK, Japan, Poland – Cert. – 123m
From the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
***1/2
An aspiring journalist in 1982 England delves into her mother’s past life in 1952 Nagasaki and unearths dark family secrets – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th
As will be seen from the above logline description, this essentially plays out in two timelines.
One is in Nagasaki, Japan in 1952, less than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb, where the married and barely visibly pregnant Etsuko (Suzo Hirose from Lupin III the First, Takashi Yamazaki, 2019; The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017; The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda, 2015; Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015) befriends Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido from River’s Edge, Isao Yukisada, 2018; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011), the mother of local waif Mariko (Mio Suzuki), who lives in an isolated shack near the river and plans to emigrate to the US with a man named ‘Frank’.
The other is in a town in England somewhere near Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1982, where aspiring journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko from Dr. Who, 2024; Lee, Ellen Kuras, 2023) is visiting her mother Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida from My Broken Mariko, Yuki Tanada, 2022; After the Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018; Like Father, Like Son, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2013), who has lived there for over two decades and is in the process of selling the house in which she raised Niki.
London-based Niki (we never see anything of London) has dropped out of university in the hope of getting together with her lover, a publisher / editor type who is stringing her along as to whether or not he’ll leave his wife for her. In the meantime, he has helped her get an article on the women’s protests at Greenham into print and is currently encouraging her to write a piece on the Japanese experience of Nagasaki. Niki is keen to do this by talking with her mother about things that mother and daughter have never previously discussed.
There is, however, quite a bit of tension between mother and daughter, with Etsuko somewhat aggrieved that her daughter spent no time whatsoever with her while researching Greenham, which was virtually on Etsuko’s doorstep. Niki’s pat response is that she was too busy researching the story, and her mother’s house would have been a distraction. However, she also has a much deeper response, which is to do with her late, older sister Keiko who, unlike the very English Niki, was born while her mother was still living in Japan. And rather than stay in her bedroom, she moves into the room in which her mother is sorting out old photos, letters and other bits and pieces from her time in Japan.
With the 1982 English narrative looking set to derail the 1952 Nagasaki one, Niki, unable to sleep one night, wanders into the sitting room to find her mother asleep – or rather waking from a bad dream – on the couch. Where, Etsuko says, she sleeps because she feels more comfortable. The bad dream involves night scenes of running down a pathway in between grasses about the same height as a person, and a mysterious box floating in a river,. As her mother starts to talk, Niki, without so much as a word, turns on her handheld tape cassette recorder.
Given that this is not exactly an interview and subject situation – at least, not until the tape recorder is switched on – it’s never clear whether mother has given daughter her consent for this. Which casts some doubt on Niki’s integrity and credibility as a journalist. And as the narrative proceeds, and spends more and more time on the Nagasaki sequences, it’s not clear whether Niki is privy to all these scenes, or the audience is being taken into the mind and past of Etsuko without Niki there. It’s also not clear (until an unconvincing plot device towards the end) whether Etsuko’s memories, presented in flashback, are actually true, or in whole or in part stories she has made up.
Be that as it may, the 1952 Nagasaki narrative increasingly takes centre stage, kickstarted by Etsuko’s running into Mariko when the latter is being bullied by boys as she holds a pregnant cat, to which the boys compare her mother. The cat will later give birth to kittens, two of which Mariko will keep and of which she will become extremely fond – and towards the end will come to play a pivotal role in her and her mother’s relationship. It will emerge that both Etsuko and Sachiko have been deeply affected by the dropping of the bomb. There are hints that radiation may have affected Mariko’s development, while Etsuko feels guilt that all she rescued from the scene was a violin, i.e. not any of the children in her charge as a schoolteacher.
We also see something of Etusko’s Nagasaki home life, married to Jiro (Kohei Matsushita), deeply affected for the worse by his wartime service, and the militaristic attitude of his father, a retired headmaster who comes to stay with the couple and is happy for Etsuko to call him Mr. Ogata (Tomakazu Miura from Perfect Days, Wim Wenders, 2023; Small, Slow But Steady, Sho Miyake, 2022; Arietty, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010; Outrage, Takeshi Kitano, 2010; Rampo, Rintaro Mayuzumi, Kazuyoshi Okuyama, 1994; Typhoon Club, Shjinji Somai, 1985). She can’t understand why her husband doesn’t want to have anything to do with his dad, even leaving unfinished an ongoing game of Shogi (a military strategy game not unlike Chess) – which the father appears to be winning. Her subsequent emigration to England was not with Jiro but with an Englishman, her second husband.
All this may work better in a book than it does in a film. That’s certainly not down to the casting here, which posits as the younger and older Etsuko two actresses who the audience immediately perceive as the same person some thirty years apart. If it didn’t get this right – and lots of films don’t – it wouldn’t work. However, this does get this right, and it does work. All the characters feel Japanese, as you would hope, with the exception of the English-raised Niki, who feels English – which makes complete sense.
And yet, somehow, as the piece proceeds, it seems to lose something. Do we perhaps need to know more about Niki in the English story outside her relationship with her mother? Could the Japanese story be somehow told more effectively? – it seems to be headed toward a very specific resolution (which is there on the screen at the end) but somehow the journey to that destination seems to lack focus, and the movie feels overlong at nearly two hours.
A Pale View of Hills is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 13th.
Trailer: