There are some shots of actress Suzu Hirose in A Pale View of Hills that are so gorgeous the audience at the Cannes Film Festival gasped aloud. Cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski clearly made heavy use of visual effects in his work – not least for the many gorgeous shots of Nagasaki as it appeared in the early 1950s – and if this is what CGI can do for a movie there should be much, much more of it. Unfortunately the visual appeal is not matched by the complex plot, which is so convoluted it’s impossible for the actors to deliver the emotional punches the material requires. But the movie is so incredibly beautiful that it should be seen all the same.
It’s the mid-1980s in England and the recently widowed Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida) has decided to downsize, meaning her adult daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) has come home for a few days to help with the packing. As they sort through the house, they have the awkward realisation this means packing up the room of Keiko, Etsuko’s daughter and Niki’s half-sister who committed suicide as an adult, many years previously. As they work through the memories within the house, Etsuko begins telling Niki about the window of time after the war but before she met Niki’s English father and emigrated to the UK for him. Young Etsuko (Ms. Hirose) is married, not happily, to a businessman named Jiro (Kôkei Matshushita), though the marriage is strained due to the stigma around Etsuko, who survived the atomic bomb dropped on the city and whose fertility is therefore unknown. Her inability to hide her radiation scars also means it’s common for her to face abuse in public, therefore it’s difficult for her to move outside of the home without fear. But Etsuko does have two resources: a kind father-in-law, Ogata (Tomokazu Miura), and a neighbour named Sachiko (an excellent Fumi Nikaidô) who rapidly becomes a friend. But friendship can only get you so far, and the world is not always kind to women who cannot for whatever reason conform.
Director Kei Ishikawa also adapted the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was published in 1982 and made an outsize impact on the British publishing industry, which was then still not quite used to considering Asian stories could be British ones, too. Mr. Ishikawa’s work is a little too tasteful, with a leisurely pace that devotes too much time to an uninteresting subplot of Niki’s instead of teasing out the full nuances of Etsuko’s post-war choices. There have not been a lot of movies in the west about the aftermath of the victory over Japan, although Godzilla Minus One recently made a huge splash on just that topic. We could have stood to hear a lot more about why Etsuko felt it was better to live as a permanent outsider in a different country speaking a different language rather than live with discrimination at home. The mystery of Keiko is never satisfactorily addressed either, but that’s because the big plot twist may well have worked better on the page.
It lands so poorly because of its implausibility but also because it relies upon Niki being a much worse daughter than she seems to be. It’s clear that Etsuko emphasized her Japanese culture to her daughter rather than assimilating her family fully into Englishness, so Etsuko’s story shouldn’t be brand new to her child. On top of that each revelation about Keiko is unhappier than the next, and it’s tough to reconcile the calm and non-judgemental mother-daughter relationship here with the much more difficult one that Keiko seems to have created. On the other hand, the friendship between Sachiko and Etsuko is rock solid and it’s wonderful to see repeated sequences of two women supporting each other in their exciting future plans for exciting future lives. The brief but repeated discussions of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women are also clever reminders of the power of literature to build empathy across cultures and centuries. And yet, and unfortunately, A Pale View of Hills is more beautiful to look at than it is to understand. But oh boy is it beautiful to look at.
A Pale View of Hills (Tôi yama-nami no hikari) recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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