The Sense of an Ending

Time will not allow us to for­get our first true love, even if it wasn’t entire­ly rec­i­p­ro­cal. In Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an End­ing, adapt­ed from Julian Barnes’ 2011 nov­el, a fig­u­ra­tive mes­sage in a bot­tle comes bob­bing to the shore after decades lost at sea. It reminds irri­tat­ing bour­geois mal­con­tent Tony Web­ster (Jim Broad­bent) of a girl he once knew, and he becomes obsessed with find­ing out what she’s up to now.

Web­ster is the sort of guy who signs for a pack­age and ignores the hope­ful smiles of the post­man. He likes to quaff Mer­lot with his ex-wife and bick­er with his preg­nant daugh­ter. Some­one has died and he has been left a mys­te­ri­ous doc­u­ment in the will, but it has been seized before he gets to see it. He has a hunch where it came from, but con­sid­er­ing his diary is trag­i­cal­ly emp­ty (his frou-frou cam­era repair shop is hard­ly pack­ing in the cus­tomers), he takes a plunge down the rab­bit hole.

And the twist is, you real­ly don’t care if he suc­ceeds. Soft focus flash­backs to the genial larks of Cam­bridge see lovestruck Tony (Bil­ly Howle) attempt­ing to nur­ture a rela­tion­ship with wide-eyed coquette Veron­i­ca Ford (Freya Mavor), but she’s hav­ing none of it. In fact, the sto­ry becomes over­loaded with intri­cate sub-plots and hasti­ly-sketched details, to the point where it become extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to keep tabs on exact­ly who did what to who and why.

The­mat­i­cal­ly, the film throws far too much into the pot, to the point where it cli­max­es on some­thing of an obscure whim­per. It talks broad­ly about the pow­er of mem­o­ry, the spec­tre of mor­tal­i­ty, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of rebirth and the tragedy of romance, also touch­ing on the idea that what one per­son might see as a minor indis­cre­tion, anoth­er expe­ri­ences as a life-alter­ing body blow.

Char­lotte Ram­pling turns up very late in the game – her astound­ing, intense five-minute appear­ance under­scor­ing how ordi­nary the rest of the film is.