The End of the Affair

THE-LENS

**Film: The End of the Affair** **Director:** Neil Jordan **Adapted from:** *The End of the Affair* **Release date:** 11 February 2000 (UK) **Story by:** Graham Greene **Starring:** Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea. **Review by: Dr Usman Latif Khawaja** The movie brings themes of religion, adultery, faith and carnal love intelligently to the screen without making a cliché of a melodramatic love story where a spouse is cheating on her rather indifferent, cold-blooded, bureaucratic husband in a discreet affair. Set in the turbulent London West End during World War II, the movie is almost as calm as the Blitz is otherwise, and the rapture of the two lovers almost makes a perfect adaptation of the complex Graham Greene book, translating spiritually onto the screen. Stephen Rea is the cuckolded husband, while the two eclectic leads, who are the soul of this artistic piece, are the two illicit lovers, played with immaculate brilliance and profound insight by Julianne Moore, who has never looked or acted better, and Ralph Fiennes, who is her clandestine lover in a role better acted than even *The English Patient*, as they conduct a perilous affair while the bombs fall around them. The religious views are paradoxical, but Neil Jordan successfully explains them in his adaptation of the Graham Greene book, as he has the courage to discover and indulge in his own convictions to define Greene's paradigms. Extremely stylish to gaze upon and even more soulful to ponder upon, this is an examination of a marriage, its flawed harmony, and the final conclusion as to the fact that human infidelity is destined too, just as human matrimony, and as such, both are unavoidable, yet they can be used to come to terms with our own discontent. This is a complex look by Graham Greene on war and adultery and acceptance of the eventual outcome by the affected individuals, which is narrated with an elite charm and panache by Neil Jordan, that brings the whole thing vividly to life, from the secretive lovers' meetings in plush apartments to the private eye who is hired by the curiously estranged husband to follow the enchanting wife in her pursuit of true love. This makes the whole experience rather an ecclesiastical ecstasy to behold and bewilder your spirit in a bizarre yet beautifully brazen piece of literary cinema.