Never Let Me Go

Bea says: This was our first outing to see a film in our new city of residence, Washington DC, and we walked across town from M St, past the White House to E St, to an art house cinema to catch it.

I had noticed it was running on the day's film listings in the Washington Post, and as Ishiguru is one of my favourite novelists and I had loved the book of the same name, I talked Cecil into going, although I wasn't sure it would be his bag. Despite a big name cast (Kiera Knightley), and Ishiguru's popularity, neither of us had been aware of this film before arriving in DC, so we were in the rather surreal situation of watching a film about the UK having newly arrived in another country entirely.

The film is faithful to the book, and I noticed on the credits that Ishiguru was quite involved in the adaptation. It did not however have the impact that The Remains of the Day had on screen, and I wondered if that was due to direction - it was missing, perhaps, the light yet masterful touch of someone like Ang Lee.

In fact different things came out for me in the film that I felt hadn't been as strongly emphasised in the book; one of the final scenes - of Tommy getting out of the car and screaming in anguish as he realises that there is no escaping his destiny - really affected me, but I only have a vague memory of it in the book.

The film felt a much sadder experience for me than the read had, although the overall mix of science fiction, human relationships, and themes of boundaries and questioning (at what will we stop? what does it mean to be human?) is untampered with. Perhaps this was because one of the film's core questions chimed with both Cecil and me that evening, or perhaps in the five or so years since I read the book the way I look at life and humanity has changed.

Thought provoking. Reading the book may be a better experience. I didn't rate Keira Knightley, but rarely do.
**1/2

Cecil says: I hadn't read the book, so unlike for Bea, the plot - or the basic 'thing' going on with the kids in the film - was only gradually revealed over the opening half hour or so of the film. That worked quite well, I thought.

Although I enjoyed the experience - and shared with Bea the sense of the surreal as we watched Bexhill sea front only a day or so after leaving England and flying over to the States - I actually left the cinema feeling rather empty emotionally. But maybe that was the aim of the director, since the existence of a 'soul' was the kind of existential theme running through the storyline and, 48 hours in to our 12 months over in the States, I was seriously wondering what on earth I was doing over here, and why I had come...

Given the familiarity of so many in the cast, it is rather amazing that we had not even heard of this film being made, let alone screened in the UK. I'll never quite understand film distributors across the world: we noticed also that a film we saw almost a year ago about John Lennon's life, was just coming out over here.

***