Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: A Pale View of Hills is an exquisite ghost story with a twist

“It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today.” So begins the third chapter of Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting debut novel, published in 1982, and now, at last, adapted and directed with great artistry by Kei Ishikawa.

Like the book, the movie embraces the mysteries of unreliable narration and is framed around a dual timeline. In Nagasaki in 1952, Etsuko (Suzu Hirose) is expecting her first child with husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), a distracted salaryman whose father Ogata (Tomokazu Miura) comes to stay (pointedly recalling the parents’ visit in Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story).

In England 30 years later, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida) is widowed after a second marriage, and is planning to sell her suburban home. Meanwhile, her half-English daughter, Niki (Camilla Aiko), an aspiring journalist, asks her to recount her memories of Nagasaki, her life in the city and the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on August 9, 1945. A point of tension is the death by suicide of Keiko, Etsuko’s elder child, about which – to Niki’s frustration – she remains reticent.

The radical aesthetic differences between the two settings are superbly rendered by Piotr Niemyjski’s cinematography. The drabness of 1980s England contrasts dramatically with the bright palette of the costumes and pageantry of Japan as recalled by Etsuko. Moments of lens flare obliquely suggest the thermal flash of an atomic detonation, as though the characters are frozen in that terrible light.

At times, Ishikawa’s tableaux approach magic realism; accustoming us to the idea that Etsuko’s recollections may not be an entirely factual account of her past.

Central to this mystery is her friend Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), who plans to leave Japan with her American lover Frank and her daughter Mariko (Mio Suzuki). Etsuko warms to the child who bears the scars of the explosion and is shunned by the customers at the noodle bar where Sachiko works. “What if her radiation rubs off on us?” one says.

As in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Shōhei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989), the suffering of the hibakusha (those who survived the bomb and endured its consequences) is an important theme in A Pale View of Hills. Mariko is stigmatised and treated as though she were infectious. Privately, Etsuko also wonders if her unborn child will be affected by radiation sickness.

The story – allusive, poignant, subtle – is knitted together by the dilemma of deep trauma; the ways in which memory can be a means of coping as well as a form of preservation; and the universal human imperative to get the measure of change and, ultimately, to welcome it. Book-ended by New Order’s Ceremony, this is an exquisite ghost story with a twist that should give Ishiguro’s novel a well-deserved second life.

FILM

How to Make a Killing (General release)

Remake Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)? Has John Patton Ford – whose directorial feature debut Emily the Criminal (2022) was so promising – taken leave of his senses? Not quite.

Though this amiably dark screwball thriller borrows the dramatic scaffolding of Robert Hamer’s classic Ealing comedy, it does not attempt what the Coen brothers did in 2004 with The Ladykillers (1955). Like Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) is in prison awaiting the death penalty; recalling the murder of a series of relatives who stood between him and what he considered his rightful inheritance.

Just as Louis’ mother is disowned in the original for marrying below her station, so New York society princess Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams, in flashback) is banished by her cruel father Whitelaw (Ed Harris) after she refuses to have an abortion – and relocates to Belleville, New Jersey to bring up Becket as a single parent. But there the similarity ends.

For a start, there is no counterpart to Alec Guinness, who played all eight doomed members of the D’Ascoyne family. Instead, Ford casts a pleasingly goofy gallery of performers to fill Becket’s target list: first, there is finance bro Taylor (Raff Law), who proves surprisingly easy to kill.

Next up (and best of all), is Noah Redfellow (Zach Woods), a spectacularly untalented artist who signs his work as “The White Basquiat”. An unexpected complication is that Becket falls for Noah’s wife, Ruth (Jessica Henwick): a schoolteacher and thoroughly decent person who makes him question his lethal plan. What, after all, did his mother mean when she told him to find “the right kind of life?”

In the other corner, ethically speaking, is Becket’s childhood crush, Julia Steinway, played as an adult by the always brilliant Margaret Qualley, who finds him working in a menswear boutique – and tells him: “Call me if you kill them all.”

So good in Richard Linklater’s Hitman (2023), Powell is still working out whether or not he has what it takes to be a bona fide superstar. From the late Robert Redford – to whom he has been tentatively compared – he might learn that chiselled features are always most compelling on-screen when they conceal ambiguity, cynicism or other forms of complexity: which is why Redford is so terrific in, say, The Candidate (1972) or Three Days of the Condor (1975). There is just enough uncertainty and moral ambivalence to Powell’s performance to suggest that he might just get there.

Suggested Reading

Snubbed: The films and actors that should win these Oscars

John Bleasdale

BOOK

Auden by Peter Ackroyd (Reaktion Books)

For a poet of such stature, WH Auden (1907-73) has been comparatively ill-served by biographers, none of whom has hitherto produced a study as useful as John Fuller’s magnificent work of reference, W.H. Auden: A Commentary (1998).

Step forward, then, Peter Ackroyd, writer of many indispensable literary biographies: notably of TS.Eliot, William Blake and Charles Dickens. In this fine life of the poet who, perhaps more than any other, defined the literary aesthetic of England between the wars, he offers a new standard work.

Born in York of supposedly Norse stock, Auden always identified with the North as his moral and cultural meridian. He loved Icelandic saga, called the high limestone moorland of the North Pennines “my great good place”, and identified North as “the “good” direction, the way towards heroic adventures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence.”

Ackroyd is excellent on Auden’s creative development: his lifelong quest for a voice with which he was happy, rooted in a rigorous attention to metre, a debt to homily, a love of Old English culture and a fascination with music, language and their interconnection.

Though he tried (unsuccessfully) to take part in the Spanish civil war and, in September 1, 1939, wrote one of the defining poems of the mid-century global conflict, he was never at ease with the political function of art. Indeed, Ackroyd shows that friendship – much more than ideology – was what gave shape to his life.

At St Edmund’s preparatory school in Hindhead, Surrey, he was a contemporary of Christopher Isherwood who would later become his lover and, for much longer, his collaborator (he said of their friendship that “the two people became a third person”). At Oxford, he met John Betjeman, Cecil Day-Lewis, AL Rowse, and Stephen Spender.

In 1940-41, after he scandalised many of his admirers by moving to New York, he was the presiding spirit of the so-called “February House” in Brooklyn Heights; alongside Carson McCullers, Louis MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, and the legendary burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee.

The closest Auden came to emotional happiness was with Chester Kallman, his longtime partner and collaborator. Yet, as Ackroyd shows, his tragedy was one frequently seen in artists of genius: a voluble public confidence that coexisted with pathological private anxiety. Soaked in booze and Benzedrine, he declined fast in later life; shambling over to Hannah Arendt’s home in November 1970 to propose marriage. “I never knew anybody,” she wrote to Mary McCarthy, “who aroused my pity to this extent.”

As Ackroyd reflects, “neurosis, specifically frustrated desire, is so often the taproot of genius.” Auden, in spite of his gifts (or because of them), was never truly happy. But he has, more than half a century after his death, finally found a biographer worthy of his life and work.

TV

Gone (ITVX)

David Morrissey is one of the very best actors around, and one who, given the right part and the right script, could easily win an Oscar. In 2018, when he was playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar at the Bridge Theatre, he told me a story about being accosted in New York by a fan who took off his shirt to reveal a tattoo of Morrissey as the arch-villain “The Governor” in The Walking Dead – that covered his entire back.  Such is the weird existence of performers who may not be megastars but still inhabit the imagination of millions.

In Gone, he is at his tremendous best as Michael Polly, headmaster of a public school in Bristol, whose wife Sarah disappears – a missing persons case that quickly becomes a murder investigation. Eve Myles as DS Annie Cassidy is also excellent: deputed to be a family liaison officer to Michael and his daughter Alana (Emma Appleton) but also determined to unlock the mystery of his apparently impermeable reserve.

Is he supremely stoic or psychopathic? “How are you coping?” she asks. “You seem… very calm.” He is not visibly moved by her question: “I have 160 pupils about to sit exams… The fact that their headmaster’s wife has not been seen for 24 hours shouldn’t concern them.”

When Michael does finally unravel, it is like beholding the sudden fracture and crumbling of an Easter Island statue.

Written by George Kay – whose hits include the Idris Elba vehicle Hijack – the series makes full dramatic use of its six episodes to explore the characters’ backstories, introduce subplots and red herrings and deliver a fair share of surprises. Gone is a study not only of personal repression but also the power of English institutions to trap and ruin their inmates. “We didn’t get out in time,” Michael tells Alana. Television drama of the highest quality.