‘The Sense of an Ending‘ is quite a demanding film. Its target audience is the mature + age, those who have in their minds and souls enough memories that have had the time to be forgotten or intentionally buried. It also demands some patience, as its characters, as many, probably most people in life, do not reveal themselves immediately and are neither exuberant, not very empathetic. It takes time to discover the human motivations of many of us, it takes cinematographic time to discover characters like the one of Tony Webster, the quasi-retired owner of a small shop of vintage cameras in London, who once aspired to become a poet. But then, in cinema as in life, you may be highly rewarded.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4827986/
The story, inspired by the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes, puts on screen a slow build-up of the young days of the main hero, who suddenly receives a small heritage from the mother of his ex-girlfriend, probably the great unfulfilled love of his university years. The almost forgotten affair with a girl named Veronica from presumably a higher class family is discovered by viewers and re-discovered by Tony, as his memories come back, some of them extracted with difficulty, exposed because of the need to share and despite the will to leave some of them forgotten. Actions in the past have had unknown consequences on the lives of other. Veronica was some kind of a mystery for the young man, maybe because of the class differences, maybe because men never fully understand women, or maybe because some dark family secrets that are never fully revealed and do not become more evident even after 40 or more years. The ambiguity of the details is part of the reason I liked the story, as in life out of books and screens not everything can and will be explained. However, the pieces of the puzzle come together and build for the hero and for the viewers an alternate, even if partial, version of the past. The final moral of the story is that changing the past can change the present or even the future. We are not only what we wish to be, we are also what our memories determine to make of us.
(video source StudiocanalUK)
The British style of living and being, its discretion and understatements fit so well this story. Director Ritesh Batra is only at his second big screens film. I hear that his debut in India with ‘The Lunchbox‘ was kind of a sensation. He succeeds to lead with skill his wonderful team of actors, plays well the card of ambiguity, and seems to understand to details the soul and dilemmas of the characters. Attention however, it’s also a personal story, so what we see on screen is always what the hero, Tony Webster sees, what we know is what he can and in some cases chooses to remember. Jim Broadbent is a wonderful actor and succeeds with talent and discretion in the lead role, even avoiding from us to become to engaged with him until he deserves it. I can be only sorry that Charlotte Rampling spends so little time on screen in this film, she is an artist I love and respect. Keeping the mystery around her character is however what was required by the script and needed here. The only more severe fault that I could find is that the younger actors playing the decades back flashback episodes do not resemble in physiognomies or characters their older selves. I could not recognize at all ones in the others. This gap left apart, ‘The Sense of an Ending‘ provided me with one of the most sensible and thoughts-provoking cinema experiences lately.