December 23–30, 1999

movie shorts

The End of the Affair

recommended

Adapted from Graham Greene’s novel, Neil Jordan’s dour romance is a world away from his visually ornate In Dreams and The Butcher Boy. Set in postwar London, the film chronicles the illicit coupling between the married Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) and the jealous-minded writer Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), who begins to suspect Sarah is cheating on him as well as her husband. Flipping back and forth through time as well as replaying scenes from multiple perspectives, Jordan’s technique is at its height. But the film’s lugubrious pace kills any sense of the passion that drives the lovers, or the hatred that later consumes Bendrix.

The End of the Affair is fascinating, though, in the way it combines romantic and spiritual themes, and the way it evolves from a story of love lost to one of faith gained. It’s almost disorienting to see a movie that’s so matter of fact about religious faith, that treats it as a force, like lust, that’s both elemental and mundane. The arrogant, supercilious Fiennes is well cast as the arrogant, supercilious Bendrix, and Julianne Moore, breathtakingly lovely in period costume, makes Sarah’s moral suffering tangible and excruciating — it’s a performance that’s almost glamorous in its rejection of glamour. The excellent casting goes all the way down, too; Stephen Rea moves and talks with gluey turgidity as Sarah’s cuckolded husband, and Ian Hart is wonderfully perplexed as the semi-competent sleuth Bendrix hires to find out the nature of Sarah’s mysterious daily absences.

Like much of what happens in The End of the Affair, those visits are more complicated than they at first seem, just as Bendrix’s first words — "This is a journal of hate" — change meaning as we come to understand more and more. The End of the Affair is a slow, unpretty film (and in all likelihood, a disastrously inappropriate holiday release), but its muted grays shot through with bursts of color convey a thought-provoking story of loss and redemption.

—Sam Adams