In 2011, I was recommended Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending in a writing class after it won the Man Booker Prize. The prose is exquisite, I was told. After a one-sitting read, the powerfully compact novel left me obsessed with memory’s malleability and vulnerability to alteration and embellishment, both conscious and unconscious, and thereby its impact on history, both personal and collective. After all, as Barnes puts it, what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
With utmost complacency, the narrator and protagonist, Tony Webster, tells you his life story, only to question it later in the novel and lose his credibility with the readers. Ritesh Batra’s adaptation, written by Nick Payne, tells the same story in possibly the only way in which it can be told: through flashbacks. But the very essence of Barnes’s novel is in feeling betrayed by Tony’s memory as much as he is. Unfortunately, the film fails to generate the same feeling of utter helplessness, frustration and pity in the audience but instead replaces it with forced enigma and suspense.
- Director: Ritesh Batra
- Starring: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter, Michelle Dockery, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Billy Howle, Freya Mavor
- Runtime: 108 minutes
That’s not to say that the film is not a faithful adaptation. It is as loyal to its source material as a filmmaker’s creative liberty permits. In pursuit of the elusive truth, Jim Broadbent plays the curmudgeon Tony as if the character was tailor-made for him. Tony meets his ex-friend Adrian and his ex-girlfriend Veronica in college, at an age when we invent different futures for ourselves. And realises the impact he left on their lives during his retirement days, a time when we invent different pasts for others.
A moment of regretful impulse can have an avalanche effect on other people’s lives. Tony’s struggle in the film is in realising the impact of his impulsive actions, but the bitter truth lies in admitting that he may not, perhaps, have had any at all. Accompanying him in this introspective journey is Harriet Walter and Michelle Dockery playing his ex-wife and daughter with much aplomb. Batra saves the best for last, by pulling out his ace card, Charlotte Rampling, in the latter part of the film, albeit proceeding to use her rather frugally. Rampling plays the old Veronica with as much expertise and poignancy as she did in 45 Years (2015).
A film – with an audience perhaps comprising mostly of Barnes’ readers, anglophiles and old people – seems too impatient to pander to the philosophical elements of the novel but chooses instead to make the narrative episodic and causal. Batra’s style of film-making is restrained, allowing the story to take centre-stage, justifiably.
During an interview before the film’s release, Batra told me, “A novel and a film can’t be siblings, but cousins”. After watching The Sense of an Ending , I truly realise what he meant. Barnes’ book and Batra’s film share the same genetics, but one is an old, seasoned, perspicacious soul – words of whom will remain with you for months, if not years to come – and the other a congenial person whose memory will only remain with you only till sundown.
