THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the film follows Stevens, the dedicated butler of Darlington Hall, as he looks back on a lifetime spent in service to a household—and to ideals—that history has left exposed.

As Stevens, Anthony Hopkins personifies a dying breed and behind his exterior of perfect control are hints of repressed emotion beneath every pause; opposite him, Emma Thompson’s Miss Kenton brings warmth, intelligence and bruised hope to an unspoken attraction that remains painfully unrealised. Spanning the mid-1930s to the post-war years, the film is both an intimate story of missed chances and a troubling portrait of political blindness and moral evasion.

Merchant Ivory specialised in period literary adaptations, but the company’s elegant style is more than decorative. Here, the polished rooms, formal rituals and clipped exchanges isolate the inhabitants from wider changes, until the post-war world begins to dismantle the class-bound nature of British society.

The film received eight Oscar nominations, including for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s finely judged screenplay as well as the costumes and set design. THE REMAINS OF THE DAY is a film of hidden feelings, silences and infinitesimal shifts, showing that the small refusals in life can shape a person’s destiny just as much as dramatic gestures.

‍

Text: Josephine Botting