Movies from the Heart—Remains of the Day

After talking about triangle love stories, I thought it would be interesting to move on to unrequited love stories… a very different animal.

First of all, there are no unrequited love story comedies [or at least, few good ones] because the nature of unrequited love is that it’s dramatic, isn’t it? And in addition to unrequited love—which is something that isn’t easy to dramatize—repressed feelings of love are even more difficult to portray.

And secondly, being able to dramatize these repressed feelings can be almost impossible. How do you show repression? Because it’s an emotion that occurs inside someone, so it’s particularly hard to portray for a visual medium. You could succumb to narration, but it’s always better to do without narration if you possibly can. And that’s where Remains of the Day [1993] by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala comes in. It manages to portray the very much internal feelings of repressed love in a glossy, glamorous—yet understated—way.

Take a look at the trailer for the film.

Everything about this film feels repressive, doesn’t it—even the music! It’s so tentative, just like Stevens, the butler. Stevens does everything right, he loses himself in his job, providing exceptional service. He’s quiet, he’s efficient, he’s a perfectionist, he’s the absolutely perfect butler.

But what about Stevens’s private life? Easy—he doesn’t have one. Then something happens that shakes up his quiet, meticulous existence—a new housekeeper, Miss Kenton, is hired. Like him, she is meticulous and gives absolutely perfect service in her role as housekeeper. But unlike him, she doesn’t fully repress her emotions.

Over time, with these two living in the same house, a relationship of sorts develops. It’s easy to see that she would welcome a romance with him, and it’s easy to see that he does care for her, but when it comes to expressing his feelings for her…well, he just can’t do it. It’s impossible for him to separate his duty to his employer from his duty to himself. In his mind, his self has to take a backseat to his duties. For what if a personal life caused him to neglect his duties? What if it disrupted his concentration on his job?

Bringing drama into a romance is hard. And when a big part of that drama is what people don’t say, that drama becomes super intense. But remember, for the viewer that drama’s very intensity is magnified by what ISN’T said between people.

And that’s a good thing to be thinking about as you write almost any kind of script—what’s just under the surface of your characters’ words and actions? And how can you show that through what they do and say.

Remains of the Day is a thoughtful film, a quiet film, that lets us get inside its characters. Study it carefully to see just how that’s done—and see if you can’t do the same in your own writing.

Next week we’ll look at another example of repressed [sort of] love in Lolita.

Copyright © Diane Lake

13Oct24

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