'End of the Affair' illuminates details of love, loss and longing




By Erin Podolsky
Daily Arts Writer
The Michigan Daily
p9
January 10, 2000





"This is a diary of hate," Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) deliberately, furiously punches out on his old typewriter in Neil Jordan's noir-soaked "The End of the Affair." Every key sings with suffering, every letter contains a manifesto on the dangers of misbegotten love. Jordan evokes an era of movie history where the play of the shadows was much more important than the play of the light, where relationships were both simply complicated and complicatedly simple. "The End of the Affair" takes these elements and molds them into a seductive musing on the nature of love and loss.

A thinly veiled fictional surrogate for famed author Graham Greene, from whose novel Jordan adapted the film, Bendrix relays his affair with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) with equal parts hatred and sorrow. She is the wife of an acquaintance of his, Henry (Stephen Rea), who works at the ministry doing whatever it is people do there.

At the outset, Bendrix has a chance encounter with Henry one cold and rainy London evening. It is a good two years after the end of his dalliance with Sarah. The movie skips back and forth in time, offering us a glimpse of Bendrix and Sarah in flagrante delecto as Henry mounts the stairs, seconds away from catching them, and then showing Bendrix's rampant insecurity and raging jealousy regarding Sarah's illicit love for him. And in the present, Bendrix discovers that Sarah is once again stepping out on Henry, who is too passive to do anything about it.

Bendrix isn't passive at all, so he hires a private investigator, Parkis (Ian Hart) to tail Sarah. He also sees Sarah for the first time since she left him one death-defying day in the midst of World War II, and they embark on a tentative resumption of their former relationship. But Bendrix is haunted by her desertion of both he and her husband, as well as failing to see why she left him. That secret is revealed in due time, and suddenly "The End of the Affair" becomes a strangely religious story rather than just one of jilted lovers.

The invention of the movie is not a typical love triangle - Henry is such a non-entity ("He hasn't noticed me for years," Sarah says simply when Bendrix expresses worry about him early on in their relationship) that he is not part of the equation. The lover with whom Bendrix finds himself vying for Sarah's affections turns out to be none other than God himself. It would be wrong for me to reveal exactly why Sarah leaves her beloved for benediction, but suffice it to say that when Bendrix, and we, learn the truth, it makes sense. The choices that Sarah subsequently makes also make sense, although they have perilous consequences.

Bendrix is a staunch atheist, but even he begins to waiver as events unfold out of control and Sarah slips further and further out of his grasp. Fiennes plays him with the fiery contempt that characterizes his work in other films, yet it seems to be a new skin he is wearing. It may have something to do with the look of the film, which seems straight out of the 1940s in both sound and feel. Or perhaps it is merely that Bendrix is every period character Fiennes has inhabited scraped bare, left only with a core of seething passion and hate. That core powers the film from start to finish, wasting and withering everything in its path. He is breathtaking in his emotion and frightening in his intensity.

Unfortunately, this slightly mars Moore's performance, particularly because her character so closely resembles that of Kristin Scott Thomas in the Fiennes-film "The English Patient." But only slightly. Her chemistry with Fiennes leaves something to be desired, but her relationship with the holy one is without flaw.

After the disastrously bad "In Dreams," Jordan returns to his quality output of days gone by. The inexplicable moments in his script become possible in his able storytelling hands. The drab color scheme allows for all sorts of shadowplay, and Roger Pratt's rich photography nicely complements Jordan's style. He mines territory that he has not touched before, sharing very little with his earlier work, and it's exciting to see him branch out in this warmly new-yet-familiar genre.

The half-defeated snarl on Bendrix's face is replaced by sad acceptance as the film draws to a close, but his loathing for his competitor never falters. His composure has been forever shattered by his inability to reconcile what happens to Sarah with his disbelief, and for that he begins to do more than believe: he begins to mercilessly hate. "The End of the Affair" is a diary of hate, yes, but it's also a diary of love, terrible and grand, gorgeous and frightful. It is utterly human in its supernaturalness and eerily divine in its ardor. The snapshot of simpler times that it provides shows that simplicity is deceptive. We all have secrets, we all have beliefs. Sometimes they help us to soar above banality. Sometimes they kill us. In "The End of the Affair," they do both.



Courtesy of Miramax Films: Julianne Moore plays Sarah Miles in "The End of the Affair," a Neil Jordan film.



 

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