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THE END OF THE AFFAIR is about a man in an intense love affair with a married woman who suddenly ends it. (The setting is London in the 1940’s.) He doesn’t know that she is having a deep religious conversion and suspects instead that she has found a new lover. He’s not entirely wrong, since this is one of those Graham Greene hound of heaven stories in which God is relentless pursuer and humans are the pursued.
Written in mid century in a period of great Catholic novels, Affair seems out of sync in 2000, even in this sympathetic adaptation by Irish writer director Neil Jordan. Catholicism then seemed more labyrinthine and mysterious. Today’s films have few God obsessed heroes (except in straightforward saint movies, like Joan of Arc, which often tell us how normal the saint is).
Here, the beautiful and intelligent Sarah (Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore) is caught in a classic textbook dilemma. When their tryst is interrupted by a bomb during an air raid, she fears that Maurice (Ralph Fiennes) has been killed. She bargains with God that, if Maurice lives, she’ll give him up. Maurice survives and (unknown to him) Sarah keeps her promise.
Both book and movie resemble a detective story as the skeptical, jealous, nonbeliever hero pieces together the truth and the identity of his rival. God leaves some surprising and touching signs.
People who dislike sexy movies or sex as religious metaphor won’t care for this passionate Affair. Devotees of Greene may argue whether or how two key changes by Jordan affect the story’s impact. But most mature Catholics will take this movie gratefully as an exquisitely rare and serious meditation on the connection between human and divine love.
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