Remembrance of things past
The Sense of an Ending 15 cert, 108 min
Dir Ritesh Batra Starring Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, Charlotte Rampling, Billy Howle, Freya Mavor, Joe Alwyn, Matthew Goode, Michelle Dockery, Emily Mortimer ‘T he past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” wrote L P Hartley at the start of The Go-Between, gazing across the oceans of memory and time separating us from our younger selves.
It’s a line that the narrators of many later English novels – from Ian McEwan’s Atonement to Julian Barnes’s 2011 Booker-winner, The Sense of an
Ending – have often felt like they are itching to use. “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed,” declares Tony Webster, Barnes’s narrator, on his own first page, hinting at all the various distortions and rewrites to follow.
This book voyages back to Tony’s school days, when his friendship with a brilliant classmate, Adrian, and first relationship with a girl called Veronica, obscurely unravelled. Come the present, Tony is a divorced, sixtysomething Londoner who mans a watch repair shop, and must reassess everything that went on. Time, almost relentlessly, is on his mind.
As a part for Jim Broadbent, this is a supremely natural, silky-glove fit. He gets to be haughty, a little cantankerous, rude to his postman. Locked doors in Tony’s memory are there for all to see. It’s not the most adventurous bit of casting – you faintly miss the sense of a great challenge. But his bone-dry, unsentimental work is a solid foundation for everything the film wants to achieve.
The narrative gambits of the book are so very literary – it’s essentially Barnes-doing-McEwan-doing-Hartley – that it’s a tricky business getting them to breathe on screen. Playwright Nick Payne ( Constellations) goes down the intermittent flashback route, rather than the consecutive structure that Atonement tried.
One advantage of this approach, methodically followed by director Ritesh Batra ( The Lunchbox), is the opportunity to replay the same event more than once – Tony’s first encounter with the alluring if sketchy Veronica (Freya Mavor), for instance – and having us notice significant changes.
The once-disparaged “false flashback” – see Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) for a notorious example – is a useful way to inscribe the failures of memory in cinema. Are they failures, though, or deliberate confusions? Classroom scenes with young Tony (Billy Howle) and Adrian (an uncomfortable Joe Alwyn) pondering a peer’s suicide resonate afresh when we learn of Adrian’s own death. Still, parcelled out in this treatment, the book’s mysteries have a slightly academic and fusty air, like dusted-off schoolwork.
The best playing in flashback comes from the excellent Howle, who gives Tony a dreamy timidity that lifts the film immensely – not least because of the distance we have to travel to get to the crabby, disappointed figure cut by Broadbent. Emily Mortimer is luminously memorable as Veronica’s mother Sarah, but so briefly.
There are far more scenes in the present day for a tense, practical Michelle Dockery, as Tony’s pregnant daughter, and the immaculate Harriet Walter, doing a witty study in resigned exasperation as his former wife and most consistent sounding board. Walter has rarely been more valuable in a film role. But the crux of the story is not, finally, hers to reveal.
It arrives with Charlotte Rampling, playing the older Veronica, who can barely bring herself to look Tony in the eye, and fixes him with that unforgiving Rampling stare when she does. Have we seen her play this kind of embittered mystery woman once too often?
The whole shape of the film has led us step by step to these encounters, prepared in too cushioned a way for what we will find out. The solution is a last box ticked – not shattering, when it comes, and in fact curiously unaffecting. Given that it’s meant to be about lives wrecked and atonement only just attempted, The Sense of an Ending errs on the side of too-orderly – the construction is tickety-boo. And you can sense it ending a mile off.