Fridae

I think Woody Allen said it best in Sleeper, one of the two sophisticated and mature science fiction films ever. “Political solutions,” Woody says in the aftermath of a population revolution led by a resistance leader with the improbable name of Erno, “don’t work! In six months, we’ll be stealing Erno’s nose!” Indeed, it would take almost 25 years for another science fiction film where at the end of the film, the protagonist does not overthrow the evil regime or discredit its boneheaded ideology. Instead, Ethan Hawke’s success ensures that the regime and its ideology of genetic superiority carries on at the end of Gattaca. So there. Don’t watch Never let me go if you want an excuse to rail against fascism and authoritarianism or to sing along off-key to the 1812 Overture. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel and this film belong that that tiny family of films that I have just named.

It also continues the great tradition of It happened here and The remains of the day. Yes, there is something horribly wrong with the parallel universe where this film takes place – what kind of political structure, social engineering, and police repression can possibly conspire to create a world where people are cloned to be willing organ donors, exchanging their lives to extend those of other people? Those are the questions that an uncreative science fiction film would ask. But Ishiguro, Alex Garland and Mark Romanek ask a far different set of questions – how would the inner and social life of a clone look and feel like? How would a coming of age story play out for these clones? How do children develop self-realisation here, and what are their limits? How do people function and live entire lives within these limits?

Never let me go asks the right questions and takes 3 children from their early school days to the end of their lives. From innocents to lovers to people facing their fate, you are forced to walk in the same shoes as these characters, who will never let you go even when the film ends.

Like The remains of the day, this film is a masterpiece that concerns itself with tragic characters who live within their prescribed limits, who come to a glimmer of self-realisation far too late. Unlike the former film though, Never let me go has characters that are so haunting and empathetic, you’d even weep a tear for them.