Enduring Love

Programme Notes

Picture this: a picnic on a leafy hill on a warm summer's day. The clink of glasses, the popping of corks. Suddenly a red, hot-air balloon bumps sleepily into view, comically attached to an elderly gent desperately tugging on the rope. Inside the basket, a panic-stricken young boy. A gentle gust threatens to sweep both to disaster. Four total strangers rush to help. They grab the basket to stop the balloon floating away. A puff of wind lifts them all off the ground… If no one had panicked there wouldn't have been a disaster. But Joe does. He has his stodgy career to think of, and a romantic rest-of-life to polish off with his perfect girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton)…

Welcome to one of the most startling opening chapters in contemporary fiction, written by Ian McEwan. Now Enduring Love is a film by Roger Michell. The scenario is a gift to any film-maker with a flair for the unexpected. But how Michell films the consequences is the true measure of his skill.

The book is a comic, mad, philosophic quest to understand love and sacrifice. The film has to persuade us that the characters are worth the effort. The brilliance of Michell's film is how lightly he wears the book. Joe Penhall's adaptation is one of those rare collectible items: a script that carves wonderful dramatic sense out of a complex literary crisis.
Not easy to do when the hero behaves as if he's delusional… The slightly hateful portrait of a smooth London couple whose smug lives are punctured by one surreal incident and a crazy stranger, is as fresh on screen as it is on McEwan's page. I'm in awe of the novel. I love the film. Might this be the best way to enjoy two frightening and subtly altered worlds?

Ian McEwan has been relatively fortunate in his dealings with the film business. True, he disowned the Hollywood version of his original screenplay, The Good Son. But Richard Eyre did a fine job on his screenplay for The Ploughman's Lunch, the cinema's most acute portrait of Thatcher's Britain and a case of the writer being the movie's true auteur. There have also been good adaptations of three of his novels - The Cement Garden, The Innocent and The Comfort of Strangers, the last scripted by Harold Pinter. Now we have an impressive version of his Enduring Love, directed by the versatile Roger Michell and freely adapted, though generally faithful to the novel's spirit, by Joe Penhall.

The movie opens sensationally as an idyllic summer moment in the Oxfordshire countryside turns into a colourful shared adventure and then switches to tragedy and guilt. In an enormous field, the book's narrator, Joe (Daniel Craig), is picnicking with his partner, Claire (Samantha Morton), and, as we later learn, is about to propose after opening a bottle of champagne. In the book, he's a successful science journalist and she's a Keats scholar, but to make them more dramatic and visual, he's now a university lecturer in north London and she's a figurative sculptor with a burgeoning reputation. He never does open the champagne because a large hot-air balloon crosses the field, its pilot being dragged along, tangled in a rope, and his 10-year-old grandson in the basket. Joe and four other men who happen to be in the vicinity rush to help, grabbing ropes and trying to anchor the craft. It seems like a lot of fun. Then a gust of wind and a wrongly pulled cord makes the balloon surge into the air. As it rises the helpers fall off one by one, fearful for their lives. But one continues to hang on and is carried hundreds of feet into the air before he loses his grip and falls, Icarus-like, to his death.

Although there's the famous shot of a child's balloon rising above the streets of Berlin to signify the murder of the abducted girl in Fritz Lang's M, hot-air balloons in movies are usually lyrical, about ways of escape - The Wizard of Oz, Charlie Bubbles, Around the World in 80 Days, for instance. Here, the balloon becomes a symbol of gravity-defying hubris and death.
This vivid, magical opening ends with one of the men in the field - young, unkempt, wild-eyed Jed (Rhys Ifans) - inviting Joe, the agnostic rationalist, to kneel with him in prayer beside the crushed, distorted body of the fallen man. Before the sequence is over, the film starts cutting in shots of a dinner-table discussion of the incident between Joe, Claire and their closest friends, a married couple played by Bill Nighy (who provides much needed wry humour) and Susan Lynch (his pregnant wife). This helps provide an equivalent of the novel's narrative detachment. Over the table, some the movie's themes are broached - courage, cowardice, guilt, responsibility, chance and fate. We think we're in for something like Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey, an investigation of what brought a group of people together to participate in a tragic event. Well, we do get this and, indeed, the traumatised Joe visits the victim's widow (he turns out to have been an altruistic GP, married with a young daughter) and discovers that her grief has been turned into neurotic anger by suspecting her husband had been there with a lover.

This revelation introduces what comes to occupy a central position in the picture - the notion that love is unpredictable, uncontrollable, ephemeral. All the relationships in Enduring Love - six of them in fact - are crumbling, have crumbled or are based on false premises.

The most significant of these relationships is what makes the movie into a thriller, though not an especially exciting one. This is the one-sided affair between Joe and Jed, the disturbed Christian mystic. The lonely Jed suffers from an obsessive, delusional condition the novel identifies as 'de Clérambault's syndrome'. He believes that God has brought them together, that they love each other and that every gesture Joe makes is a signal designed just for him.
What Enduring Love becomes, in its dramatic action, is a version of Strangers on a Train, with the homoerotic subtext of Hitchcock's film brought to the surface. From adoring admirer, Jed turns into stalker and then into a potentially homicidal menace. And Joe, who cannot involve Claire in his torment, cracks up.

This is a rather glum picture, but it's been put together with great care. The film rings true, though the university classroom scenes are not particularly convincing (they rarely are). Craig and Morton agonise with great conviction and Rhys Ifans has never been this good before. Haris Zambarloukos's atmospheric photography neatly contrasts a sullen, glowering London with the deceptively sunny countryside, and Jeremy Sams's score ranges from Vaughan Williams pastoral to Hammer horror melodramatic. The locations are well chosen, though Tate Modern is on its way to becoming a new cliché, the art-house equivalent of Tower Bridge.

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