REMAINS OF THE DAY

Rip It Up, Issue 200, 1 April 1994, Page 28

REMAINS OF THE DAY

Director: James Ivory

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Upstairs Downstairs novel won the author a Booker Prize in 1989, and might well have been custom-made for the Merchant-Ivory team, flushed with the success of Howard's End. The film of Remains of the Day comes across as a nostalgic reminiscence of the turbulent 19305, seen through the eyes of a butler, Stevens. Cocooned in a country estate, Stevens is unaware of the Nazi sympathies of his employers and is so emotionally stunted that

he is unable to cope with his attraction to the spunky young housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson). Stevens, played by a marvellous and remarkably unmannered Anthony Hopkins, is part of that hideous pecking order otherwise known as the English class system - he’s mocked by the men in the smoking room for his lack of political opinion, but in turn he humiliates the desolate Thompson in her final scene at the country house. He’s so craven that he will not leave his butler’s duties to visit his dying father upstairs. Yet Stevens is, in turn, humiliated by Thompson when she reveals he spends his lonely evenings reading romantic novellas. Remains of the Day is a little weighed down by its grandeur, Richard Robbins’ music is obtrusive, and cinematic trickery such as showing the passage of time by characters fading in and out of a shot, is obtrusive. But if the satiric bite of the novel is a little blunted, there is the disturbing thought that the values Ishiguro is criticizing are by no means eradicated, even in this country. WILLIAM DART