La fin d'une liaison

Love and the spiritual (i.e. inner) life have rarely been better portrayed! Graham Greene's novel has been translated to cinematic imagery with an almost religious devotion. It isn't easy to make profound and meaningful experience so immediate and felt as this film does. Watching it on video...a second viewing...I was even more deeply moved than the first time around.

Julianne Moore, very much on the big screen these days (and for good reason), gives another of her splendid performances, this time as Sarah Miles, a middle-class English woman, married to a good, but dull man who takes her for granted. Her encounter with Maurice Bendrix (played to a T by the consummate actor, Ralph Fiennes) is electric and sets in motion an affair of deep consequence...for all three people involved. Stephan Rea as Henry Miles, Sarah's husband, trapped in his desire, but inability to fulfill the emotional and sexual needs of his much-loved wife, is another convincing and touching portrayal.

The spiritual aspects expressed in the film, reflect the life-long struggle of Grahame between his Catholicism and his doubts. The deep pulls of each character toward both personal and impersonal love give the film a dimension and an honesty that reward the "participant" (for that's how potent the film is) with an indelible human experience.

To Neil Jordan, the director, my wholehearted gratitude for his sensitive, nuanced presentation of this beautiful film.

Two years after the sudden end of his affair with Sarah, Maurice bumps into her husband, Henry, who confides in him about his wife's possible infidelity. Driven by the same jealousy that plagued him during their affair, Maurice poses as Sarah's husband and hires a private detective to follow her and find out what she's doing. As his investigators probe Sarah's personal life, Maurice remembers back to his affair.

Having seen the 1950's version of this book, I was interested to see a version that didn't have to worry about the heavy censorship of that period. Funnily though, it is not the nudity, passion or sex that adds to this version of the story; rather it is the ability of the film to show the strong feeling and emotion between the characters. The plot is pretty true to the book and follows the same turns that are ultimately quite touching (even if their reliance on honour and promises to god seem out dated today). The film manages to evoke sympathy, pity and dislike for each of the three main characters - each is a victim here and the film allows us to see that and feel for each of them regardless of the rights and wrongs of their respective situations.

It is difficult to describe but the film is very much of the period; it is very reserved and honourable considering the material, but yet it is deeply emotional and involving. The only sticking point is the plot's reliance on Sarah's prayer; as I said, it seems difficult to accept in this age that this would have been held to - ironically the 50's version was more acceptable for some reason; maybe because I saw them having sex in this film, maybe then I found it harder to accept a `sinner's prayer' as it were. Besides this, it still does work well and is quite tragic as a love story - this is not a romantic date movie sort of thing!

The main reason I was able to buy into the heart of the emotion was the performances. Fiennes is so perfectly English in the role; he is restrained yet bursting with emotion. He does a wonderful job of having his character eat away at himself with jealousy without ever seeming pathetic. Conversely Rea does a good job of making his character pathetic but still very much keeping the sympathy of the audience. The fact that I get to see Moore in the buff (again!) is not a boost to this film, however her performance is. She is good in the role (better and freer than the 50's actress) even if I didn't feel she was as good as Rea and Fiennes - maybe because her character is less expressive and, simply, a `good' person: I can only assume Greene was unable to look down on his lover even after the end of the affair.

Overall this film has a few sticking points but it is a wonderful version of Greene's book of the same name. Much was made of the nudity and such, but it is the rawer emotion of this telling that makes it work well. The script puts them on the screen and the cast do well to bring them out as complex as they are in real life.

Look at the comments on this site. There's pretty much a perfect split between people who think the film is unrelentingly dull with no redeeming features, and people who think the film is an amazing achievement. I fall into the latter category, and can't for the life of me figure out the former.

This is not an action film. There is no violence. There are no thrills, chills, spills, or anything along those lines. There are three terrific characters, there is an amazingly romantic relationship, and there are superb performances. There is a wonderful director who keeps everything tightly reigned in. There is nothing superfluous in this film. It is perfect.

Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) is a novelist who meets beautiful Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) at a party hosted by her husband Henry (Stephen Rea), whom Bendrix is researching for a book. In no time at all, Sarah and Maurice begin a tempestuous and passionate affair which continues through World War II, until Sarah breaks it off suddenly after an air raid which nearly took Bendrix's life. A chance encounter with Henry two years later brings Bendrix and Sarah together again, and they rekindle their affair as the truth about that air raid is revealed.

A nice enough story on its own. But what makes this film great is the approach that Jordan takes (or perhaps it's not his approach... I'm not familiar with either the novel by Graham Greene or the 1955 film). The opening line of the film is typed by Bendrix onto a clean sheet of paper: "This is a diary of hate." It is only at the end of the film that the viewer understands who it is that Bendrix hates, and why. The story is a dramatization of what Bendrix is writing.

First, he tells us about 1946, when he just happened to see Henry walking in the rain. It's this moment that opens the door for Bendrix, and for us, into his own past. Then Bendrix proceeds to interweave his recent experiences of 1946 with events that transpired during the War. That gives us three distinct time frames for the film, which are introduced to the viewer in reverse chronological order.

Also, it is useful to remember that everything we see on screen (with the exception of several scenes of Bendrix typing away) is a depiction of what Bendrix writes. The entire film is told from Bendrix's point-of -view. This allows us two things: 1) more intimate access to the inner workings of such a fascinating character, and 2) it allows us to enjoy the mystery element of the story much more. If you'll notice, all of the best mysteries tend to have single-character POVs. Look at Chinatown, or The Maltese Falcon. Splitting the POV tends to give audiences information which they should not get before the main character does.

Not that this film is a mystery. There is a mystery in it, which is central to the plot and to Bendrix's situation, but I wouldn't call the film itself a mystery.

What makes this film great is its understatement. It is a very English film, and the characters and performances are all very English. Emotions are fiercely felt but subtly expressed. That makes it highly demanding of its audience, but even more rewarding. It also explains why so many call the film boring. Sarah was described as an ice queen in one review here, and Bendrix was called shallow. Like most reviews (including this one), those comments say a lot more about the people who wrote them then they do about their purported subject. Sarah is intensely passionate, Bendrix is a layered and complex character.

So, not for all tastes, but a brilliant film. Better than any and all of the Best Picture noms of 1999.

This film tells the story of a wartime love affair between Maurice, a successful, cynical and rather callous novelist, and Sarah, the beautiful but neglected wife of a dull senior civil servant. She tends to believe in the supernatural, he does not, but both are spurred on by the danger of both discovery and the bombs raining down on London. Perversely, when her husband confides to Maurice his suspicion that Sarah is having an affair, Maurice hires a private detective to investigate, in effect, himself. In the end, it is God who decrees the finale, not the characters, who accommodate as best they can to their destinies.

Do we really care? This is not easy to answer. Maurice, the narrator, is a prize prick, unfeeling of others, concentrated on his misery and his work, yet obsessively jealous. Sarah provides a focus for his substantial sex drive but he does develop an affection for her. Sarah, on the other hand, clearly likes a good bonk as well, but she needs the relationship to full the void left by her husband's emotional absence, and Maurice is too self-centred to be a real soulmate. She is also quite a nice person in comparison with nasty bitter old Maurice. So yes, we are sorry for her. We have to admire Maurice for being honest enough to tell the story but there is an air of self-flagellation about it.

As a film, this is a terrific piece of work, directed by the Irish director Neil Jordan who was responsible for "The Crying Game". Greene is a very cinematic novelist - at last count there were at least 40 screen versions of his works - and Jordan has very cleverly used a present - flashback - present and then forward technique to tell the story from both Maurice's and Sarah's viewpoint. The gloom and danger of wartime London is effectively invoked but there was a bit of overkill in having it rain almost continuously from 1939 to 1945 (London has less rain days than Sydney!) It struck me early on that Ralph Fiennes was by no means inevitable in the part - I was reminded of the early Sam Neill. His character is really rather empty - a man whose only real commitments are to his work and sex. Julianne Moore, delightfully bad as Mrs Cheveley in "An Ideal Husband", and delightfully slapstick as the childish Cora in "Cookie's" Fortune", is much more sympathetic here. Stephen Rea (a Jordan favourite) as the cuckold is the most sympathetic of the lot or at least the most self-aware. He gives us a wonderful portrayal of stitched up dismay and yet it does not seem beyond the bounds of credibility that, knowing of the affair, he should invite Maurice to come and live with them towards the end.

Greeneland is a pretty bleak place, but a couple of apparent miracles brighten things up. Greene clearly thought God had a sense of humour. The novel is said to be semi-autobiographical, but the real affair Greene had with the wife of a wealthy businessman, while no doubt equally painful, did not end so melodramatically as the novel. Looking at a biography of Greene by Michael Shelden I note that Catherine Walston, whose relationship with Greene was the chief inspiration for "The End of the Affair," died in 1978, aged 62, 13 years before Greene. According to Shelden, Catherine refused to see Greene on her deathbed because she didn't want him to see how sick she was. The affair itself petered out in the early fifties, though they remained in touch. Henry Walston, it seemed, asserted himself and demanded that Catherine cut down on her contact with Greene. Greene went overseas to find danger and forget, to Vietnam and elsewhere, and these trips produced at least one more major novel, "The Quiet American." However Greene's career as a writer peaked with "The End of the Affair." His later work is interesting and readable, but never again did he reach the same emotional depths and heights.

Greene is often said to be a Catholic novelist but on the basis of this work at least he wasn't a great pitchman for the Almighty. Greene was, however, an eloquent portrayer of spiritual suffering and this aspect has been effectively brought to the screen by Neil Jordan. Perhaps it takes an Irishman to understand an English Catholic.

One of the great joys in movie watching lies in stumbling across films that, by their very nature, should be nothing more than clichéd, hackneyed versions of stories we have seen a thousand times before yet, somehow, through the insightfulness of their creators, manage to illuminate those tales in ways that are wholly new and unexpected. Such is the case with Neil Jordan's `The End of the Affair,' a film that in its bare boned outlining would promise to be nothing more than a conventional, three-handkerchief weepie centered around the hoary issue of romantic infidelity, but which emerges, instead, as a beautiful and moving meditation on the overwhelming force jealousy, love, commitment and passion can exert on our lives.

Ralph Fiennes stars as Maurice Bendrix, a British writer living in 1940's London, who has an affair with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), the wife of Maurice's friend, Henry (Stephen Rea). Based on a Graham Greene novel, the film achieves far greater intellectual and emotional depth than this skeletal outline would indicate. Part of the success rests in the fact that both the original author and the adapter, writer/director Neil Jordan, have devised a multi-level scenario that utilizes a number of narrative techniques as the means of revealing crucial information to the audience regarding both the plot and the characters. For instance, the film travels fluidly back and forth in time, spanning the decade of the 1940's, from the initial meeting between Bendrix and Sarah in 1939, through the horrendous bombings of London during World War II to the `present' time of the post-war British world. This allows the authors to reveal the details of the affair slowly, enhanced by the even more striking technique of having the events viewed from the entirely different viewpoints of the two main characters involved. `Rashomon' – like, we first see the affair through the prism of Bendrix's limited perspective, only to discover, after he has confiscated Sarah's diary, that he (and consequently we) have been utterly mistaken as to the personal attributes and moral quality of Sarah all along. Thus, as an added irony, Bendrix discovers that he has been obsessing over a woman he `loves' but, in reality, knows little about.

The authors also enhance the depth of the story through their examination of TWO men struggling with their overwhelming jealousy for the same woman and the complex inter-relationships that are set up as a result. In fact, the chief distinction of this film is the way it manages to lay bare the souls of all three of these fascinating characters, making them complex, enigmatic and three-dimensional human beings with which, in their universality, we can all identify. Bendrix struggles with his raging romantic passions, his obsessive jealousy for the woman he can't possess and his lack of belief in God, the last of which faces its ultimate challenge at the end. Sarah struggles with the lack of passion she finds in the man she has married but cannot love as more than a friend, juxtaposed to the intense love she feels for this man she knows she can never fully have. In addition, she finds herself strangely faithful, if not to the two men in her life, at least to two crucial commitments (one to her wedding vows and one to God) yet unable to fully understand why. Henry struggles with his inadequacies as a lover and the strange possessiveness that nevertheless holds sway over him. Even the minor characters are fascinating. Particularly intriguing is the private investigator who becomes strangely enmeshed in the entire business as both Bendrix and Henry set him out to record Sarah's activities and whereabouts, a man full of compassion for the people whom he is, by the nature of his profession, supposed to view from a position of coldhearted objectivity. (One plot flaw does, however, show up here: why would this man, whose job it is to spy on unsuspecting people for his clients, employ a boy to help him who sports a very distinctive birthmark on one side of his face?).

`The End of the Affair' would not be the noteworthy triumph it is without the stellar, subtly nuanced performances of its three main stars. In addition, as director, Jordan, especially in the second half, achieves a lyricism rare in modern filmmaking. Through a fluidly gliding camera and a mesmerizing musical score, Jordan lifts the film almost to the level of cinematic poetry as we sit transfixed by the emotional richness and romantic purity of the experience. `The End of the Affair' takes its place alongside `Brief Encounter' and `Two For the Road' as one of the very best studies of a romantic relationship ever put on film.