“A Pale View of Hills,” the 1982 debut novel of Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, finally has a screen adaptation, and quite a good one, by celebrated Japanese director Kei Ishikawa (“A Man,” “Traces of Sin”). Seeing it at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, I was wondering why it had taken so long, until third-act developments made it clear that this would be no conventionally weepy drama about mother-daughter reconciliation.
It's not that the film becomes incoherent — Ishikawa’s script clarifies much without being overly explanatory — but it does go down a path blazed brilliantly by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 masterpiece that made “unreliable narrator” part of the language.
In the film, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the actuality of what we are seeing is called into question, in pursuit of deeper truths.
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