Director Roger Michell is best known for the fluffy fantasy of ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), targetted directly at an American market and presenting a view of London life whose only link to reality was the place names – but since then he has elaborated a much darker vision of romance in Britain’s capital, first in the Hanif Kureshi-scripted taboo-breaker The Mother (2003), and now in ‘Enduring Love’, starring Daniel Craig (who also featured in The Mother) and Rhys Ifans (here a million miles away from the comedy of ‘Notting Hill’).
A perfect summer’s day, a perfect champagne picnic in a meadow – but just as science lecturer Joe (Daniel Craig) is about to pop the question to his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton), the peace is interrupted by an out-of-control balloon, and in the rushed confusion of the ensuing rescue attempt, a man falls to his death. Joe blames himself for what has happened, and his increasingly unhealthy obsession with the event alienates him from Claire. Meanwhile Jed (Rhys Ifans), another man who was at the scene, keeps turning up, only adding to Joe’s deranged sense of guilt. Jed, however, is driven by his own, rather different obsession…
In deciding to adapt Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel ‘Enduring Love’ for the big screen, scriptwriter Joe Penhall risked forever being stalked by the book’s legions of adoring fans, not least for the many changes in detail and emphasis he had made to the source material. Characters have been significantly altered, like the sculptor Claire (originally a Keats scholar named Clarissa, and far less prominent here than in the book), or else simply invented from scratch, like Joe’s friends Robin (Bill Nighy) and Rachel (Susan Lynch), whose lasting and happy marriage provides a neat counterpoint to Joe’s own damaged situation.
Yet the film remains true to McEwan’s intellectual preoccupations with different kinds of love, and has lost none of the novel’s most memorable elements: the plays on the ambiguity of the title, the arresting first scene, and the strange dynamics of the relationship between Joe and Jed. What is more, the film brings a vivid immediacy to events which goes beyond anything on the written page, be it the face-to-face drama of Jed’s dialogues with Joe (conducted in the novel mostly through letters and phone-calls), or the occasional brilliant reds (the balloon, blood, etc.) that flash from the film’s otherwise subdued palette, signifying all at once eroticism, danger and passion with a visual economy reminiscent of the colour-codings of Zhang Yimou.
‘Enduring Love’ is a meditation on love structured as a thriller, so that its more exploratory ideas always remain focussed by the tautness of the narrative.Yet while an eerie blue-lit scene in a public pool alludes to John Polson’s more conventional SwimFan (2002), for the most part ‘Enduring Love’ avoids the clichés of the thriller genre – at least, that is, until an unnecessary coda which suggests, somewhat absurdly, that love may endure even as far as a sequel. Avoid this by turning off as soon as the end credits start rolling, and you are in for an unusual and intelligent film about the outer limits of obsession.