The End of the Affair (1999)

[wmcclain]

The End of the Affair (1999), directed by Neil Jordan.

Sarah: Love doesn't end, just because we don't see each other.

Maurice: Doesn't it?

Sarah: People go on loving God, don't they? All their lives. Without seeing him.

Maurice: That's not my kind of love.

Sarah: Maybe there is no other kind.

Movies are good at the direct, the literal, and the obvious. The invisible workings of life are more mysterious than that, incomprehensible to everyone in it and exceedingly hard to present.

I'm reluctant to use words like "perfect" or "masterpiece", but this is a little gem of a film, inescapably troubling the mind and piercing the heart. For some reason I didn't think much of it when it was new, but after a recent rewatch I begin to gush. Where's the Blu-ray?

The twentieth century had a small literary genre I think of as a sort of "crypto-Catholicism": not explicitly religious but where intimations of the beyond creep up and entrap the characters. Flannery O'Connor was an American example and Evelyn Waugh did it in Britain with Brideshead Revisited and his Sword of Honour trilogy.

Graham Greene was another prominent English example, putting himself and his love travails into this story. The setting is before, during and after the Second World War and the story jumps back and forth, giving the same scenes from different perspectives, after we have new knowledge. At one point I thought we were seeing alternate histories, what might have been, but no: same street, same people, just a different year. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), when reflecting over our lives we become unstuck in time.

The background is the War and the bombing of rainy, smokey London, but the frame is smaller, kept to a small group of troubled people.

We have:

• Ralph Fiennes is the narrator, an author recording the story of his hate. ("You're a good hater" the priest tells him). Who does he hate? That is to be revealed.
  
  He is a jealous, possessive lover. She cheated on her husband so she will cheat on him too, right? Despite their shared passion her love is on a higher level he does not comprehend. No one does.
  
  His moment of perfect happiness: waking in the rubble of the stairway after the building has been struck by a V1 bomb. Like being born again or returning to life.
• Stephen Rea, the director's favorite actor, is the husband, a dull sexless civil servant. His love is not of the type his wife or friend appreciate, but it shines brighter toward the end.
  
  His moment of happiness: none. He is a sad man.
• Julianne Moore is the wife and adulteress, a woman of passion who gives her whole heart and body to her lover. And has to give him up after the bomb falls. "I knew nothing in this world would make sense to me again". And even then goes back to him, breaking a promise made to God.
  
  Can such a woman be a saint? "I tempted fate and fate accepted". A little matter of what seems to be two miracles. "And we don't believe in those, do we?" chides the bitter author.
  
  Her moment of perfect happiness: simple loving kindness when she kisses the boy's cheek ("His afflicted cheek" his father says, meaning the large birthmark). As if she were healed by her own act of healing.

Scored and conducted by Michael Nyman, always an asset to any film. He is best known for the kinetic beauty he added to Peter Greenaway's art films, and for the Scottish-sounding piano concerto in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993).

Here he provides elegiac melody that sounds like one of the soundtracks of life. Really: when people say that I think they mean the pop music playing at the time, but if music moves you then life does have musical themes. Michael Nyman is one of those artists who can score the inexpressible poignancy of life. That's what it sounds like to me.

Jo Stafford's "Haunted Heart" is the period music.

I also want to mention Ian Hart who I just saw as the young John Lennon in Backbeat (1994), perhaps better known as the unfortunate Professor of the Dark Arts master Quirrell in the first Harry Potter film. Here he is a likable working-class outsider in the seedy job of private detective, spying on women to get the goods on them for divorce actions.

Some passion scenes, boobs and backsides. The self-image of the English is of coldness; it's good to break the stereotype.

Available on DVD, not very good quality. I'd like an upgrade.

The director provides a commentary which has -- as you would expect -- many worthwhile reflections:

• When making a period film he can't help but think of films made during that time. "Should I put the camera where David Lean would?"
• An Irishman, he feels as much an outsider to British class structures as the average American.
• Many actresses wanted the lead, but Julianne Moore tested and walked away with it.
• Neither she nor Ralph Fiennes required any sort of nudity or passion clauses in their contracts, both doing what was needed without hesitation.
• He did not know the book had been previously filmed as The End of the Affair (1955) and waited until the end of his own production to see it. His judgment: "Proof that films have always been bad".
• When he proposed the project to Columbia they didn't even know they had the rights to the book.

[Swithin]

Thank you for this insightful review. I remember seeing The End of the Affair when it was released and having mixed feelings about it. I love the actors. I had been admiring Ralph Fiennes' work since I saw him as Cobweb in Regents Park, when he was in his early 20s. Years later, when I had the pleasure to work with him and mentioned that, he replied "A friend told me I was the definitive Cobweb." I've seen him on stage at least a dozen times, from Cobweb, Romeo, and Troilus to Brand, Prospero, Antony and even as Bert Jefferson in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and, most recently, as Robert Moses in Straight Line Crazy.

But I digress, as I fear what I will write now might be offensive. I have a tiny problem with conversions to Anglo-Catholicism, and (as I recall) The End of the Affair reeks of its author's conversion. Your term "crypto-Catholicism" is, I think, spot on. I do love the television version of Brideshead Revisited, even though it represents Chesterton's concept of "a twitch of the thread." Waugh, who has said that Brideshead is (to use your term) "explicitly religious," even uses Chesterton's phrase as a title for a section of Brideshead, the "twitch" meaning the Church's yanking back what it perceives to be its own.

The early twentieth century British writers who embraced/converted to Catholicism (Greene, Waugh, Chesterton, etc.) may be regarded as the children of Cardinal Newman and the Oxford movement, 19th century Anglicans (mostly High Church) who yearned for reunification with Rome. They are fascinating individuals to study and had a great impact on the religious life of their time. But I find most of them full of a rather distasteful and dogmatic fervour. On the other hand, what seems to be my personal dogma is that English people should be -- and remain -- Anglicans. If you want to read about a particularly offensive present-day Anglo-Catholic, read about Jacob Rees-Mogg.

On the other hand, an Anglican convert to Catholicism whom I absolutely adore is Tom Driberg (1905-1976), one of the most delightful and shocking of the group. A film about him cries out to be made.

I did a performing arts project working with Romanians many years ago. I was sent to that country to organize a festival. Shortly after I arrived, a prominent artist said "We should be Catholics." In the Romanian case, I agree. The woman went on to say that Romanians are a Latin people with a Latin language, and that the Romanian Orthodox Church does not sit well with them. That's kind of the opposite way I feel about the English, for whom Anglicanism suits their souls. On the other hand, Alfred Hitchcock was a Catholic, but his roots were in Irish Catholicism. I think one of the great scenes of all time is the Ambrose Chapel scene in The Man Who Knew too Much (1956). In that brilliant scene, you have an English Roman Catholic director portraying in his film the dourest congregation of evangelical Protestants, singing a Wesleyan Good Friday hymn on a Monday. And who is the character who receives Grace in that film? The wife of the evil minister (Bernard Miles), played by Brenda de Banzie, who is the only person in the chapel wearing makeup (besides Doris Day). The other parishioners are all John Knox lookalikes in their demeanor. Mrs. Drayton must surely be an Anglican.

I've often found it interesting that the great writers of the Irish theater are almost all Protestants: Sheridan, Boucicault, Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Shaw, O'Casey, and Beckett. (Wilde may have converted to Catholicism very late in life, but that's ok, because like Tom Driberg, I think he was just attracted to the trinkets.)

I'm not RC, but I studied Theology with Jesuits. In studying the Oxford movement, I memorized the following poem, written by an Anglican as a diatribe against Newman and the Oxford movement:

"God grant our wavering clergy back those honest hearts and true,
That once where theirs, 'ere Papal snares, their toils around them threw.
Let not them barter wife and child, pure hearth an happy home,
For the drunken bliss of the strumpet kiss of the Jezebel of Rome."

Sorry -- I haven't said much about The End of the Affair. Perhaps I should see it again, as you did. But there is so much still to see...

And in the end, what does anyone really want? To quote the English/Irish Anglican Louis MacNeice:

"It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky.
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi."

And some of my best friends are English Catholics.


Tom Driberg may have converted to Catholicism, but he was friends with Aleister Crowley and the Kray Twins, so it's alright.