Kazuo Ishiguro has had the sort of week that would make one of his own narrators set down the teacup, gaze out at the drizzle and observe, with tremendous restraint, that matters had not proceeded entirely as anticipated.
On Thursday 15 October, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. By the following morning the British broadsheets had lined up like a firing squad that had been told the blindfolds were optional. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Kevin Maher in The Times and Tim Robey in the Telegraph each gave it one star. Maher called it “a hopeless film, slippery and mendacious, full of gross Hallmark sentiment”. Robey called the pairing of Waititi and Ishiguro a “match made in hell”. Bradshaw settled for “a slice of sentimental whimsy-futurism and non-satire”, which is the most Guardian way possible of throwing something at the screen. Little White Lies headlined its review “Send it back to the factory”, and the Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey, who was generous enough to find two stars, noted that the film is “about the power of love and friendship. That seems like quite the downgrade.”
World of Reel clocked it at 23 on Metacritic on the night, and Forbes reported a 20 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score from the first ten reviews. That is a tough start for a film about a solar-powered robot who believes the Sun will make everything right if she asks nicely. The critics, it seems, have supplied the cloud cover. Jenna Ortega plays Klara, the Artificial Friend bought to keep a sickly girl company, with Mia Tharia as Josie, Amy Adams as her mother, and Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne in support. Sony opens it in UK and US cinemas on 23 October, where audiences will get their own say. We haven’t seen it yet, and our verdict can wait until we have.
And yet, on the very same day, Deadline reported that Tim Burton is to direct an untitled film written by Ishiguro. It is an original story, not an adaptation of any of his novels, and it is set in post-war Japan. There is no studio, no cast and no release date. Burton has a gap in the diary now that the third season of Wednesday has wrapped, though it is not yet certain this will be the next thing he shoots.
Put the two stories together and a pattern emerges from Ishiguro’s screen career. When other people adapt him, the results vary. The Remains of the Day (1993), with Anthony Hopkins as the most emotionally constipated butler in English literature, collected eight Oscar nominations. Never Let Me Go (2010), scripted by one Alex Garland (currently on roughly his third retirement), was a beautifully made piece of British SF that found more admirers than ticket buyers. When Ishiguro writes the screenplay himself, as he did for Living (2022), Bill Nighy gets an Oscar nomination and so does Ishiguro. Burton, in other words, is getting his Ishiguro direct from the factory, with the warranty intact.
The setting is the intriguing part. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five, and his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, are both set in Japan in the years after the war. Burton, on the other hand, usually means Sleepy Hollow fog, stripy tights and Johnny Depp in eyeliner. Nobody has said what genre the film is, so this is pure guesswork, but a Tim Burton film set in post-war Japan that contains no ghosts at all would be the most surprising thing either man has ever done.
As for Klara, the reviews raise an awkward question about whether the book was filmable at all. The novel works because Klara narrates things she does not understand, and the reader slowly works out the horror she cannot see. A camera has no such tact: it simply shows you everything. Never Let Me Go ran into much the same wall. Whether Waititi found a way round it, or drove straight into it while wearing a novelty hat, is something we will find out next Friday.
Stevens the butler would doubtless describe the week as one of certain disappointments, balanced by not inconsiderable consolations. Klara puts her faith in the Sun. Ishiguro, rather more sensibly, has put his in Tim Burton.
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