A Pale View of Hills

In the adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel, two time levels intertwine to explore memory, grief, and displacement. In rural England in the 1980s, Niki visits her mother Etsuko and asks about her half-sister Keiko. Niki urges her mother to speak about her past in Japan, and Etsuko hesitantly shares her memories of Nagasaki in the early 1950s. At that time, the young Etsuko, pregnant and married to the strict Jiro, leads a confined domestic life overshadowed by the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Her friendship with Sachiko, a glamorous but ostracized single mother, and Sachiko’s withdrawn daughter Mariko, opens her eyes to another way of living. Sachiko longs to escape the confines of bleak postwar Japan and dreams of running away with an American soldier, while Etsuko observes this yearning defiance and begins to question her own role as an obedient wife. But soon memories and desires, repressed lies and bitter truths, blur and merge into a new picture.