mewsings in May 2006, page 2 of 2

The first 18-rated film I saw was Alien. I’d been dying to see it ever since seeing its poster on display at the old East Grinstead cinema. A glowing green egg, and the words “In space no one can hear you scream”. It seemed like the perfect recipe for an SF movie, and the fact that they didn’t show the alien on the poster just made me all the more keen to see it. (I have a real hunger for monsters.)

Unfortunately, I was only 8 years old at the time. I couldn’t believe I had 10 years to wait. At one point it came on TV. I savoured reading the article in the TV Times that said even the film’s writer had nightmares about his creation, but my Mum wouldn’t let me watch it for that very reason. Another time, I walked into a model shop in Croydon and was amazed to see they had an action figure of the alien. How could that be? Surely the appearance of the alien ought to be some closely-guarded secret? I was disappointed to find the alien had a basically human shape, but managed to convince myself they’d altered it for the action figure; the real alien in the film would be something much stranger, less human…

And then finally I got my chance to see it. My brother and I were on holiday with my Dad in Scotland. We were visiting some people Dad knew who lived in a large country house (which I for some reason insist on remembering as being a castle, but that can’t be right). Someone there had a video of Alien. My chance to see it at last.

One thing marred that first viewing. Halfway through, the VCR was commandeered by a mum whose young boy just wouldn’t go to bed without watching his favourite video. So, shortly after the alien actually got on board Nostromo, we had an intermission of The Little Donkey, which sort of broke the mood a bit. Then it was back to the film. I can’t remember if I was disappointed to finally see the alien itself, but having subsequently watched the film countless times, I can’t believe I was. What I do remember is, having watched what must be the scariest film I’ve ever seen (bar The Sixth Sense, I suppose), was that we then had to go to bed, and our beds were not in the large country house itself, but in a building a short walk away. Nothing to worry about, surely. We said our goodnights, then left the building… And found ourselves in absolute darkness. That must have been the first time I realised that out in the country, when it’s dark, it’s dark.

In his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Kazuo Ishiguro carried off some real storytelling magic, through the way his narrators’ subtle, and often unconscious self-revelations would turn the story totally on its head. His third, The Remains of the Day (1989), I found less effective in this respect, but it still managed to tell a compelling tale full of subtlety, understatement and implication. Perhaps, then, I had too-high hopes for his 2000 novel, When We Were Orphans.

Its narrator is Christopher Banks, a private detective who was born and spent his early childhood with his parents in pre-war Shanghai, until they disappeared (presumed kidnapped) and he was shipped off to England. Ishiguro has him come across as being straight out of a cliched detective novel. He carries a large magnifying glass, is known for his success with ‘the Mannering case’, is deferred to by the police even in murder investigations, and is internationally regarded as a celebrity. Right from the start, I thought this was either a jokey pastiche of some sort of sub-Agatha Christie pulp detective novel, or (more likely, I thought) Banks is a self-deluding fantasist.

The latter became more likely as, when he returns to Shanghai to try to track down his parents, he seems to (a) think they will still be in the same place (and alive) after eighteen years, and (b) considers the solution of this case as an important part of staving off the encroaching world war. What makes it all even more bizarre is that everyone else treats his case with the same importance. Some Chinese soldiers, for instance, are prepared to give up defending the front in the middle of a war to escort him to the (ruined) house where he assumes his parents are being held!

I was, at every moment, expecting some hint from Ishiguro that his narrator was either insane or still a child, daydreaming the whole novel. But it appears he was quite serious throughout. In fact, there were no revelations at all. Was the novel a satire of detective fiction, then? If so, it’s not a very good one, as the only thing it satirises is a very outdated idea of the consulting detective as superhero, something that doesn’t exist in modern detective fiction at all, where the flawed hero is de rigeur. But also the novel seems to be trying to make a serious emotional or thematic point, which it couldn’t hope to succeed if it was nothing but a light-hearted fun-poking exercise.

As I say, perhaps it was my expectations of the novel, coming from my real enjoyment of Ishiguro’s first two, which made it such a disappointment? I don’t think so. Anything genuinely worthwhile about the novel would still come through, even if I was expecting it to be something else.

Lost in Translation. Bill Murray stares into space.

Broken Flowers. Bill Murray stares into space. For even longer.

But he does it so well! The criticism I heard for Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers was that it was “more of Bill Murray doing what Bill Murray does”. And there are certainly a lot of long, actionless sequences in which he does nothing but sit there, staring into space. But for some reason it’s extremely funny. (Albeit in a quietly despairing kind of way).

The plot is that Don Johnston (Bill Murray), a successful businessman with a long line of women in his life, receives an anonymous letter telling him that he has a 20-year-old son he never knew about, and that the son is coming looking for him. Don’s neighbour, Winston, a detective-story fan (excellently played by Jeffrey Wright — just the way he handles the letter speaks oodles about his character), badgers him into setting out to find which of the five exes from that time is the mother.

Watching Broken Flowers is all about adjusting to the film’s pace and paying attention to its subtle nuances of character. Much of the humour comes from the mini character-studies of the women Don visits, as it is revealed how they have changed in the two decades since he knew them. Seeing them through Don’s eyes, as we do, they seem bizarre. But the main character study, of course, is that of Don himself, who is left, each time, seeming emptier and emptier.

Something best characterised by staring blank-faced into space, I think.