The film is about the fact that we are all going to ‘complete’ – die – in the end which is inevitable, and we have not got enough time. Why do we exist? Like the ‘clones’ in the film who are made to live to donate their organs numerous times and eventually die before even hitting mid-age, perhaps we are similarly instrumented by God (or any ‘bigger’ existence) to love, experience, give, take, live…all just to have it taken away from us in the end by death (often very abrupt death). Kathy puts it perfectly in the final lines of the film, “What I’m not sure about is whether our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. And none of us really understand what we’ve lived through. Or feel we’ve had enough time.”
So Tommy’s scream towards the end is the desperate agony of the soul, a plea for sense and truth. Andrew Garfield explains the scream in an interview for Film Independent, “a last stitch attempt to…it’s going, it’s going, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here…is there anyone else there? If there is, now is the time to show yourself.” “You poor creatures” says Madame, after informing them that there is no such thing as a deferral. “We didn’t have the Gallery in order to look into your souls. We had the Gallery in order to see if you had souls at all.” Clones they may be, but Kathy and Tommy are full of soul and individuality. Kathy in particular loathes the way Ruth attempts to ‘copy’ Rodney and Chrissie, who ‘copy’ what they see and hear on television. In the DVD extras, Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of the novel, explains that he used this sci-fi element of clones in order to see more clearly what it means to be human.
Why don’t these characters ever try to escape? Have they been so institutionalised that they have nothing but what they have grown up with? Surely not. Ishiguro stated in an interview, also for Film Independent, that he tried to write about how we do not run away and accept our fates, as opposed to the heroic stories of protagonists who escape (or desperately attempt to) from their destinies. There is nowhere to run away to, I suppose. Had they somehow managed to run away from the operation process, the inescapable fate of death, of ‘completion’, is still there, merely coming a little bit later.
No doubt Ishiguro’s novel is beautiful and an absolute pleasure to read. I have not read it so I cannot comment. But the film has strived to be visually aesthetically pleasing as well, and succeeds with distinction. The entire film (with only a few exceptions) has been filmed in the scenic countryside, and the colouring in general is very pastel and natural. The characters wear simple clothes and the cottages are nothing fancy; they are beautiful because they are only built up on necessities. There are no shiny new toys at the Hailsham school sale, but old hand-me-downs. They have their groceries delivered to the cottages as opposed to going out and buying them, coming back with shopping bags full of items. Such materialistic ideas are blown away by the wind, caught in the barbed wires in the final shot of the film.
There is definitely something compelling and strange about this film throughout, both before and after we learn about the childrens’ fates. I cannot quite point my finger at it; even simple shots of objects feel as though there are deeper, hidden meanings beneath the surfaces. And when I came out of the cinema after seeing it for the first time I felt I needed to sit down and think about it because I felt there must be some deeper meaning I hadn’t quite grasped yet. But there isn’t. The story is about love and friendship in the little time we have; there is nothing difficult to understand. The film is great because of its unique story, the already-discussed visual splendour, and the sadness we cannot simply forget about or escape from; the story is fictional and very extreme, but its theme is truth in its entirety.
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