Film: The sense of an ending

The Sense of an Ending looks promising: experienced actors and a director who conquered numerous hearts with his film debut adapt an award-winning book by Julian Barnes. But things didn’t turn out entirely as expected.

Jim Broadbent is a divorced grouch who wants to retrieve the diary of a prematurely deceased childhood friend, left to him by the mother of his old love. The latter (Rampling) refuses to give him the diary. Unfortunately, director Batra (The Lunchbox) has primped and preened the film excessively, so the characters lack depth and development and Barnes’s profound ideas about the problematic reconstruction of the past have been hollowed out.

> The sense of an ending. UK, dir.: Ritesh Batra, act.: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling