The gloss of those days is tainted heavily by the way that history has unfolded. But we start to sense that old and new are misaligned, rendering in slight pathos Stevens’ blind loyalty to tradition, to a dying vision of pre-war England – the glory days, when he served Lord Darlington and his many prominent, influential, and often deeply conservative and sometimes fascist guests. Stevens is the commander of a fleet of staff who keep the crockery shining and the floorboards polished, faithfully serving the lord of the house. Oh no no, for there are ways that things are simply meant to work around here. “Why don’t we just get her a pop-up toaster?” Farraday retorts. “The cook cooks the cooked breakfast while her assistant toasts the toast,” says Stevens to his new American employer, Mr Farraday (Christopher Reeve), apologising for the burnt toast and concealing it inside his suit jacket. The Remains of the Day begins after the war has ended.
This film came hot off the heels of their wildly successful collaboration in 1992 Howard’s End, also brought to us by the same team of director James Ivory, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant. His counterpart and lost love is the housekeeper Miss Kenton, brought to life with gusto, yet an appropriate amount of English restraint by Emma Thompson. The chief holder of the heartbreak is the central character and narrator, Mr Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), an unflappably professional butler.
The backdrop here is mid-century England, both at the height of its coat-tailed class order and the crumbling of this worldview post-second world war.
James Ivory’s 1993 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day reminds us that the scale of history is in fact contained in heartbreaking miniatures – individual lives and loves that unfold against the backdrop of wars and political intrigue. T wo of life’s chief comforts for the price of one: a classic film, and a masterful reworking of a classic novel.
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