This pensive but not entirely faithful adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Booker prize-winning novel is seeded with recurring images of circles. There’s the cycle of life: Tony (Jim Broadbent) receives news of a death just as his daughter is about to give birth; then, in a deceptively amiable Werther’s Original narration at the film’s opening, Tony conjures up the image of life as a series of holding patterns, concentric circles that you navigate as you wait for the next stage to start.
This urge for closure – to loop back to a moment in the past – is a common theme in drama featuring older people. In the unexpected ingress to a lost moment of youth, and in the presence of Charlotte Rampling in a key role, the film evokes Andrew Haigh’s masterly 45 Years. Both films plough similar terrain of regrets and buried secrets, both feature finely crafted performances by veteran actors.
Director Ritesh Batra’s camera is particularly adept at capturing the subtle flags that indicate that people know each other a little too well: a flicker of something, part irritation, part amusement, that passes over the face of Margaret (Harriet Walter), Tony’s ex-wife, when he delivers his restaurant order with the same cantankerous precision with which he approaches life.
This is involving storytelling, but ultimately the film is undermined by its own tasteful restraint. The holding pattern image is a fitting one – there is a sense here of a film that never quite touches down on a satisfying conclusion.
