REMNANTS OF THE FILM DAY. This drama bringing together Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the cast is the adaptation of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
[Mis à jour le 28 octobre 2022 à 20h30] The remnants of the day is an American-British film by James Ivory released in 1993. This adaptation of the eponymous novel by Kazuo Ishiguro is a great critical success, bringing together Anthony Hopkins in the role of a faithful butler and Emma Thompson, housekeeper with whom he worked a few years earlier. This dramatic film which deals with the opposition between the honorable and orderly British Old World and the American New World in which business dominates, from the point of view of a rigorous butler who unfortunately misses out on his life because of his sense too sharp of duty (hence the image of the pigeon flying away at the end).
The remnants of the day does not strictly adapt a particular true story. It remains a fiction, the story of butler Stevens is thus invented. But the context of the film borrows many springs from History with a capital H in connection with the Second World War. Some characters are thus inspired by real British aristocrats and politicians who succumbed to the fascist ideology of the 1930s. This is the case of Sir Geoffrey Wren, inspired by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Conversely, if the title of Duke of Darlington did indeed exist, the Lord Darlington seen in The Remains of the Day is entirely fictional, since the title disappeared at the end of the 19th century.
Synopsis – The doubts and torments of the butler of a large English family who in 1956, after thirty years of perfect service, wonders if he has not wasted his life.
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‘eponymous’ means that the object or concept has taken on the name of the person who discovered, described, or created the object or concept (or with whom it is most closely associated), as in ‘the Edwardian Era’ or ‘a herculean task’.