The End of the Affair

viewed January 15, 2000 at the Palo Alto Square Cinema

For full information about this film, click here

A film that longs for the sadder, sweeter time of post-war London (and the treacly batch of English domestic melodramas that accompanied it), when educated, sensitive men could act like fools because they really didn’t know any better in a pre-sexually liberated society.  A sweet melancholy lingers over the film like a fog, but like a fog you won’t find much in the way of hard substance in the midst of all the glossy, nostalgic production design.  The idea of a stately-looking romantic Catholic mystery movie is intriguing in this godless day and age, and I was very much looking for something that would bravely embrace the power of religion in defiance of modern mores.  But I found the ideas towards religion somewhat pedestrian and outdated, the old modernist’s argument for faith that occupied Eliot, C.S. Lewis and Greene, the kind of guilt-ridden middle class salvation to atone for comfortable middle class lifestyles.

Ralph Fiennes, the perennial self-absorbed brooder (he’s getting to be like a Michael Douglas type of character, the persecuted male, only his emotional wounds are self-inflicted) and Stephen Rea, who is making a living out of playing the pathetic fop in Jordan’s films, are profoundly
unexciting in this film. Julianne Moore does an impressive turn playing a British woman touched by God. Ian Hart, another Jordan mainstay, is the film’s real delight as the dogged yet principled private investigator.  (Can you believe he played John Lennon in Backbeat?) His character provides a sense of humour about its subject that the rest of the film sorely lacks.  The whole predicament of Fiennes realizing that he, the cheater, is being cheated on ­ and through God, of all possible paramours ­ should have been mined more for its absurdity than its tragedy, a tragedy that rings false in an age that doesn’t take itself as seriously.

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