{"id":4662,"date":"2011-04-05T23:34:31","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T13:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4662"},"modified":"2011-04-27T23:18:04","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T13:18:04","slug":"never-let-me-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4662","title":{"rendered":"Never Let Me Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago, when I was a kid, my mum bought me a copy of Raymond Brigg’s When The Wind Blows<\/em>.\u00a0 It tells the story of a middle aged British couple who bravely and naively prepare for nuclear war. They follow hopelessly inadequate government instruction manuals on how to protect themselves from nuclear radiation and then slowly waste away when the unthinkable happens.\u00a0 Throughout this ordeal the couple resolutely display those time-honoured British qualities: they remain good-natured and keep a stiff upper lip.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Never Let Me Go<\/em> reminded me a lot of When The Wind Blows<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The film opens with a title panel that explains, without going into detail, that a medical breakthrough in the middle of the 20th Century has cured ‘the incurable’ and the average life expectancy is now over a hundred.<\/p>\n

We are then introduced to three children Kathy, Tommy and Ruth who all grow up at Hailsham school in the 1970s.\u00a0 Although the school strictly forbids the children to wander outside school grounds, the teachers seem otherwise quite considerate and the film initially appears to be an idyllic take on British boarding school life.\u00a0 Kathy, the film’s narrator, is earnest, kind and bright.\u00a0 She politely tolerates her friend Ruth’s snobbier and slightly more arrogant qualities and she is also quite taken with Tommy, a simple minded boy who is the butt of the jokes in his class.\u00a0 The three of them become good friends.<\/p>\n

Something seems off about Hailsham school though.\u00a0 The children, although in their early teens, take lessons on how to order food and drink in a cafe, as if they are completely isolated from the outside world.\u00a0 No mention is ever made of parents.\u00a0 Eventually, the film plays its hand and reveals that these children are lab experiments.\u00a0 They are being raised to the age of young adults at which point they will be harvested for their organs so they can be donated to people in the outside world who become seriously ill.<\/p>\n

Now because this is not an American film, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth do not bust out of the boarding school, dramatically escape their fate and expose to the world what a sordid ordeal they are in.\u00a0 Instead, they embody a similar attitude to the old couple in When The Wind Blows<\/em>.\u00a0 Most of the time they are politely and stoicly resigned to their fate.\u00a0 One of them eventually tries to delay their forced organ donation by offering to fill in a medical form which they hope will delay the procedure for a few years.\u00a0 When they are declined, they maintain their stiff upper lip.\u00a0 At least for a while.<\/p>\n

The children are conditioned by the school to use euphemisms for their impending fate.\u00a0 They do not die after losing multiple organs, they simply ‘complete’.\u00a0 Peversely, they also take pride in counting how many donations they can give up before expiring on the operating table as a badge of honour.<\/p>\n

Despite the rather horrific circumstances facing the cast, Never Let Me Go<\/em> is primarily focused on exploring the relationships of young lovers who know they are on borrowed time.\u00a0 If these poor bastards have one advantage over the rest of us, its that they get a memo from the government letting them know when their time is up.\u00a0 And knowing that makes every second count.<\/p>\n

Never Let Me Go<\/em> explores very similar existential themes to what the Replicants experience in Blade Runner<\/em>.\u00a0 Some meekly accept their fate.\u00a0 Others desperately scramble to get a few more years.\u00a0 The wiser ones know to make the most of the time that they have.\u00a0 This highly unusual concept film is well served by its central cast Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield who are all uniformly excellent in their roles.\u00a0 The skillful direction by Mark Romanek never oversells the story and trusts that the audience can keep up and observe what is unfolding.\u00a0 It’s a thoughtful film and after the credits rolled, I was more than a little creeped out by what I saw and left pondering questions about life, the universe and everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donor kebab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[659,859,858,857,861,860],"class_list":["post-4662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","tag-alex-garland","tag-andrew-garfield","tag-carey-mulligan","tag-keira-knightley","tag-never-let-me-go","tag-when-the-wind-blows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4662"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4823,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662\/revisions\/4823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}