Never let me go (2010)

As much as I like Kazuo Ishiguro, Never let me go turned out to be a quite bad film with interesting ideas. The story had some potential, but a better film would have required some drastic changes in how this film was made and what choices were made in terms of material and character development. The story revolves around three persons, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. In the beginning of the film, we see them in a boarding school. Even though the film takes place in modern time, the clothes and settings made me think of the forties. Gradually, we understand something fishy is going on. It turns out these children are destined to become donors – to function as a set of spare part for other people (this is a world where most people live to be 100 years old). From early on, they seem to be aware that their lives will be short, that they will live in isolation from the world, and that its main purpose is to function as a body, rather than as a real person. – Were this to be developed in the direction of a full-blown Sci-Fi story, I wouldn’t have minded much. Some aspects of the story present a chilling – and disturbingly familiar – outlook on a society diverged between those who are to live and those who are to serve, if only with their bodily parts. The characters live in an eerie state of subordination, yet without any sort of external power to hold them back. This is perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the film: why don't they rebel? What does it mean to accept one's misery as normal and ? But: of course the director (who made One Hour Photo) opted for the grandiose Love Story. And there the trouble begins. The result is fully orchestrated, saccharine and very conventional love scenes.  Many scenes are too predictable, too one-dimensional – the emotional quality of the images lack a necessary dimension of – yes what? I was going to say: ambiguity, but that is certainly wrong-headed. Rather: it is as if the film didn’t believe in its own story, so it has to augment it with emotional material that is supposed to make us “care”. 

Symptomatically, it is the quieter scenes that work. These are the moments when we become aware of how empty the world of the characters is, how it lacks the stuff and bustle of everyday life. In one scene, when the children have grown up, two of them as donors, one of them as “carer”, we see Kathy, the carer, pushing Ruth, who is a donor, in a wheel-chair through a desolated hospital corridor. There is no music, and the dialogue is sparse, too. Here, at last, the film hints at the unsettling nature of the content of the story.