You don’t have to get too far into Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to realize it’s hopelessly unfilmable. Strictly speaking the book is science fiction, but that’s not the problem: there are no strange creatures or unknown worlds, and in any case digital technology has already made such fantastic images commonplace in the movies. What blocks Ishiguro’s story from the screen is simple language, precisely chosen and delicately shaped, which creates a sensibility the movie’s talented actors can only approximate. In this subliterate age, when text messagers demote words to single letters, technical writers render instructions in pictographs, and popular novels read like glorified screenplays, you have to admire a story that defies visualization, that stakes its life on the written word. Never Let Me Go qualifies as a great novel partly because it could never be great as anything else.
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An intelligent, sensitive young woman, Kathy is attuned to the slightest social and emotional nuances, and her discursive, frequently backtracking narration would give any screenwriter a run for his money. But what gives the novel its force, and makes it impossible to dramatize properly, is the space between her polite, well-bred voice and the horrible reality that lies beneath it. More than a third of the novel has passed before the truth is spelled out, though by that time it’s already crept up on you, with all the talk of “carers” and “donations” and “completing.” The students at Hailsham may seem to be children of privilege, but in fact they’re all human clones, engineered for the sole purpose of organ harvesting. Ishiguro’s carefully controlled prose, with its dainty euphemisms, turns a sensational premise into a philosophical inquiry; Kathy’s proper British reserve in the face of this monstrous arrangement isn’t all that different from the way we all protect ourselves from the modern world’s dehumanization.
Unfortunately that’s showbiz: screenwriters are routinely taught that a viewer needs to understand what’s at stake within the first ten minutes or he’ll bail out. Garland’s previous screenplays, both for director Danny Boyle, dealt with a zombie epidemic (28 Days Later . . .) and a space mission to keep the sun alive (Sunshine), both matters of self-evident importance. But telling a story about the unspoken social gamesmanship between a couple of 12-year-old girls is much harder, which may explain why Kathy’s constantly shifting relationship with the cagey, defensive Ruth (played as an adult by Keira Knightley) flattens out so badly onscreen. On the page their conflict is held aloft by Kathy’s minutely observed prose and, ultimately, the buried fear, rage, and despair that motivates all three kids in their interactions with one another. But the hardest part of any novel to adapt is the part between the lines.
Bromberg and Medrea present numerous montages of this experimental work—most of it in rich, saturated color—and it suggests that, had L’Enfer been completed, it would have been, at the very least, a masterpiece of psychedelia. Geometric patterns pulse with energy, and multiple exposures create clouds of human eyes. Fun-house mirrors show the characters’ heads twisting, ballooning, and merging; trick shots with plate glass positioned before the lens show the characters deformed by cascading water, or they’re lit with rotating red and blue spots that turn their faces into multicolored pinwheels. Reverse and fast-motion photography yields simple but wildly hallucinatory effects: in one shot Schneider laughs as sparkling fluid is sucked from a glass back into its bottle, and in another she lies nude on a train track as a train appears to roar up to her at full speed and then halt.
HENRI-GEORGES CLOZOT’S INFERNO ★★★★ Directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
