The End Of The Affair

* * * * *

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Stephen Rea

Director: Neil Jordan

Rating: M, contains sex scenes

Running time: 105 mins

Opens: Thursday

Review: Peter Calder


Inspired by his adulterous love affair with the American woman Catherine Watson, Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair, published in 1951, has always been regarded as the most autobiographical of his novels (he dedicated it, with the single letter C, to her).

Gloomy, brooding, intimate and - like all Greene's work - drenched in the ambiguity of his lifelong crisis of faith, it might have seemed an unprepossessing project for a film-maker. But Jordan, who with films like Mona Lisa and The Crying Game has demonstrated an astonishing ability to turn downbeat material into riveting cinema, is more than equal to it.

Working from his own script, he makes one masterpiece into another and extracts from a wonderful ensemble work as good as they've ever given.

The affair of the title has long ended before the film opens on a rainswept night in London in 1946. Maurice Bendrix (Fiennes) a bitter and disenchanted novelist, meets his old friend Henry Miles (Rea), a proper and joyless man from the ministry.

When Henry confides his suspicion that his wife Sarah (Moore) is deceiving him, it rekindles Bendrix' own jealous obsession with the woman, with whom he himself had a brief and tempestuous affair two years before. Its abrupt, unexplained ending - at her initiative - has continued to torment him and he sees a chance to answer old questions.

The dense and complicated narrative unfolds effortlessly in Jordan's treatment, moving seamlessly - often within a single shot - between present and flashback and revealing its secrets only gradually. In the process it manages to be many things at once - a period love-story rich in sexy allure, a thriller both psychological and metaphysical and a profoundly spiritual rumination about faith, sin and redemption.

It's hard to speak too highly of the way everything comes together here. Though dripping with passion, it has the same understated stillness of Ivory's Remains of the Day, say, or Attenborough's Shadowlands and watching it, it's often hard to breathe.

Fiennes, lacerated by doubt and jealousy ("I'm jealous of everything that moves, I'm jealous of the rain," he tells Sarah as she raises her umbrella) turns in the most compelling performance of his brilliant career. Moore, though perhaps icier and brittler than Greene conceived her, never looked more radiant or mysterious. Rea, too, lends texture and a sad dignity to a colourless role, unlike any he has played.

Costumes, production design and lensing are all sumptuous and although it has only been slightly Oscar-nominated (Moore and the cinematographer), it will, I'm already sure, be in my year's top 10.