ENDLESSLY ALLURING
Jim Broadbent leads a stellar cast in a tale of sex, secrets and guilt that keeps you guessing all the way
UNDERSTANDABLY, most of us prefer not to look forward to our declining years – or what inevitably and unavoidably follows. But if we’re forced to, we all like to think that somehow everything is going to be all right in the end. The
Sense Of An Ending challenges that expectation, posing the sort of questions we go through life trying to avoid. What if it’s not going to be all right? What if the long-forgotten sins of our distant past are going to come back and bite us painfully on our, by now, sagging behinds?
This is a film about sex, secrets and guilt but, because it’s adapted from a novel by Julian Barnes, it’s also about something more abstract. It’s about the nature of truth – can we ever really know what happened unless we were there ourselves?
If that makes it sound potentially rather hard work for an Easter treat, please don’t be put off. It is modestly demanding but it’s also very well acted by a cast led by Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, directed with an attractively light touch by Ritesh Batra (he made The Lunchbox, the lovely Indian romance from 2013) and has a pleasing undercurrent of what I admit, at times, is well-concealed optimism.
Broadbent plays Tony Webster, a man in his late sixties who lives alone in affluent, leafy south London. He’s retired but runs a small camera shop as a hobby. However, he hates being interrupted by customers; in fact, he’s impatient and irritable with just about everyone except for his barrister ex-wife (Harriet Walter) and his single but pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery).
And then his well-ordered life is interrupted by a letter revealing he’s been left something in a will. But what is it, and when will he get it? He huffs off to the unfortunate solicitor to find out. But if he got all the answers at the beginning, what sort of film would that be? So, let me just give you one: it’s a diary. By now, the flashbacks – to both school in London and university at Bristol – have begun, giving us ample opportunity to second-guess what might be afoot.
A pretty but enigmatic girl (Freya Mavor) that the young Tony (Billy Howle) meets at a student party is clearly pivotal, but she won’t tell him her name for a long time or, indeed, as their relationship deepens, have sex with him. Is that the woman the solicitor is talking about, the woman who has the diary? And what role does the precociously intelligent Adrian Finn (Joe Alwyn) who, newly arrived at Tony’s school and immediately challenging their history teacher, have to play?
I love the well-constructed first half of the film, as we gradually but intriguingly discover how little we know. It gives us the chance to appreciate some fine acting too, particularly from Walter, who, with not a whole lot to go on, makes Margaret – a polished professional and certainly nobody’s idea of a longsuffering ex-wife – such an interesting character. How on earth has she remained on such good terms with her ex?
Barnes’s fans will, of course, know where we’re heading, and how creepy Tony will become in the process, but I hope they’ll still find enough to enjoy here as, first, Emily Mortimer and James Wilby appear in flashback, playing the girl’s modestly monied parents, before the action returns to the present day and Rampling takes over as the girl herself, albeit now a ‘girl’ approaching 70.
This is a film on a modest scale with gentle structural echoes of The Go-Between, and with emotion at
its heart rather than action. From time to time, it does feel as if it might just as well be on TV.
But in that increasingly impatient medium, it certainly wouldn’t be allowed to unfold as elegantly as it does here.
Be warned that it does live up to its title – delivering a series of late revelations that, while shocking, leave you only with a sense of an ending rather than a fully resolved conclusion.
You’re going to have do some of the hard work yourselves.
But go on, it’s worth it.