The End of the Affair (1999)

Another movie that TCM ran during last year's 31 Days of Oscar which is now showing up on one of the premium movie channels is the 1999 version of The End of the Affair. Based on a novel by Graham Greene that was published in 1951, there's also a 1955 film version with Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson. The 1999 version will be on Starz Cinema tonight at 8:16 PM if you have the premium channels.

This version starts in 1946 London, so not long after the end of World War II. Maurice Bendix (Ralph Fiennes) is a writer who is bitter for reasons that will be explained later in the movie. He runs into Henry Miles (Stephen Rea), whose wartime service was on the homefront, getting all sorts of bomb shelters up and running. Henry has a lovely wife in Sarah (Julianne Moore), who just happened to have an affair with Maurice during the war. Henry feels Sarah is being unfaithful, not knowing about her past relationship with Maurice. Maurice suggests seeing a private investigator, which Henry doesn't really want.

So Maurice goes to the detective, Mr. Parkis (Ian Hart), who uses his young son Lance, deformed by a birthmark, as somebody who won't garner unwanted attention. Maurice figures that there's some third guy that Sarah is seeing, and he'd like to know who that other guy is. Maurice then starts having flashbacks to the original relationship with Sarah, which are necessary to the plot as we need to see just why Maurice has the strong emotions that he does. Back in 1939, just before World War II started, Maurice was a writer who was recovering from injuries sustained fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He and the Mileses live fairly close to each other, which leads to Maurice showing up at a cocktail party the Mileses are giving and Maurice first meeting Sarah. They pretty quickly fall in love with each other, and once war breaks out, it's not too difficult for them to carry on their illicit affair since Henry is away on war business all the time.

Meanwhile, we keep moving from the flashback to the current day. Parkis traces Sarah to a particular address where she's seeing a doctor, but that the doctor's appointments are clearly too long to be just medical necessity, which means it must obviously be some sort of tryst going on, like the Edmund Lowe/Jean Harlow relationshp in Dinner at Eight. Maurice eventually comes up with a ruse to see the doctor, only to discover that there is no doctor in the house. Instead, Sarah is seeing Fr. Smyth (Jason Isaacs), a Catholic priest living with his housekeeper sister. (Recall that Graham Greene was a devout Catholic in a country with an overwhelming Protestant majority, and his Catholic faith comes through in a lot of his stories.) Sarah was born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, although she was never particularly observant growing up. Maurice, on the other hand, is thoroughly secular, not believing in God. But Sarah's Catholic faith might explain her previous actions.

Back to the war, and the affair keeps going up, right up until 1944 when the Nazis start firing the V-rockets at London. Maurice and Sarah are having sex in his apartment when the air raid sirens start going off. He steps out of the room to check and see if anybody will notice them evacuating the building together, when the force of the blast sends him falling down a couple of flights of stairs. He wakes up some minutes later, bloodied but not dead, and heads back up the stairs to discover... Sarah is praying. She's told God that if Maurice is alive, she'll work for God's forgiveness by never seeing Maurice again, which is why she has to break off the affair and why Maurice only saw her again after the war.

But now that they've seen one another again, they can start that affair again... or can they? Henry might find out, and there are other complications.

I haven't seen the 1950s version of this story, even though I'm a fan of old movies, so I have to admit I didn't know much about the story going in. This version of The End of the Affair is well-acted and generally well-made, although the depiction of WWII London looks a bit too neat. The story might be a bit difficult to follow at times since it keeps moving from the present day to the flashbacks without always being clear about what it's doing. You definitely need to pay close attention. If there was one big problem I had, it was the plot point of the kid having such an obvious birthmark. You'd think if you wanted somebody who could spy on people unobtrusively, having a big birthmark would be right out, since that's something everybody would notice about you on first sight and remember. But the birthmark turns out to have plot significance by the end of the movie.

If you want to see modern-day movies not encumbered by the Production code deal with infidelity during an earlier era, then The End of the Affair handles things pretty well, and is definitely worth a watch.