The Sense of an Ending

seen on 23 April 2017

Jim Broadbent s Tony Webster, Harriet Walter as his divorced wife Margaret and Charlotte Rampling as Veronica (once his girlfriend) star Nick Payne's adaptation of Julian Barnes's 2011 novel, directed by Ritesh Batra. Billy Howle plays the young Tony, Freya Mavor the young Veronica, Emily Mortimer her mother Sarah, and Michelle Dockery plays Tony and Margaret's daughter Susie.

I've not read the book, but a glance at it shows that some changes have (inevitably) been made. However, regarding it simply as a film, it is not perfectly realised, and the sense of an ending is not really achieved at all. The crux of the matter is the revelation of an episode from Tony Webster's past as filtered through his current recollections. This is triggered by the news that he has been left a diary and some money by the mother of an ex-girlfriend, and by the further fact that Veronica, who is administering her mother's estate, is withholding the diary.

Handsome Devil

seen at the London Flare Festival on 1 April 2017

John Butler directs Fionn O'Shea as Ned Roche and Nicholas Galitzine as Conor Masters, with Adnrew Scott as the English teacher Dan Sherry. 

Ned and Conor are boarders at a rugby-fixated Irish school - another closed community (compare Heartstone), another interaction between gay teenagers (compare Die Mitte der Welt or Quand on a 17 ans). But here, with a mischievous Irish wit, Ned narrates a far less flamboyant tale than Phil does in Die Mitte der Welt - he is gay, but in his school environment there is no place for easy tolerance, though mercifully for him there is little outright violence until a crisis precipitates a mild punch-up. And Conor, unlike the beguiling Nicholas of the German film, is keeping a prudential low profile about his sexuality, hoping to fit in at his new school after a mysterious exit from the previous one 'for fighting too much'.