Director: Mark Romanek
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins
Kazuo Ishiguro's hauntingly "unfilmable" novel comes to the screen in this beautifully shot and carefully restrained adaptation directed by music video legend Mark Romanek and written by Alex Garland.
Slow and demanding Never Let Me Go presents a picture of England that on the one hand is bound up with the traditions of tea and boarding school and on the other is encircled by a chilling portrait of an alternative world in which clones are bred specifically for the purposes of organ harvesting.
At Hailsham School the teachers believe that they can still raise their clone pupils with ideas and values that will enable them to lead happy lives until they reach "completion". All of which sits waiting ominously in the background as we watch the story of three friends, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth and the love triangle that develops between them in school and carries on into the years after when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their purpose in the world. Love may conquer all but it can't stop progress.
This is not science fiction in the Blade Runner sense (although there are some of the same themes at the heart of both stories) but more in the tradition of Gattaca - a human-centred tale of people living in alternative, though not too far removed universes than our own.
Carey Mulligan brings just the right combination of nostalgia and uncertainty to the character of 28-year-old Kathy H, who narrates the story while Andrew Garfield gives strong support as Tommy.
Even Keira Knightly does a little more than her usual pouting up, biting down lip puppetry in the role of the 20-something Ruth.
By focusing on the love story and keeping the science fiction in the air but not on the screen, Romanek stays true to the original material and thus allows the film to increase its emotional power as it progresses without having to resort to melodrama, cheap tricks or overblown pageantry.
While viewers unfamiliar with the book may find the film sometimes cold this is in keeping with the tone and themes of the novel and Ishiguro's particular talent for telling stories backwards and with the benefit of hindsight.
In the end it's a story of how people who aren't supposed to be people become just like the rest of us and it's a strange, sad film that gracefully evokes the world of childhood and its combination of innocence and ignorance so convincingly that you could almost become nostalgic for this world that, thankfully, doesn't exist yet.
Source: www.timeslive.co.za
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