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Dir: Ritesh Batra (12A, 108 mins)
Julian Barnes’ slim meditative Booker prize winning novel on the reconfiguring of memory gets a film treatment with mixed results. In place of the novel’s darkly ruminative tone emerges some upbeat misplaced comedy, side plots that pad out the story entirely created for the film and a feeling of ‘so what’. Jim Broadbent plays ageing grump Tony Webster, who receives a letter out of the blue saying he has been left some money and a diary belonging to an old school friend who had committed suicide years ago. The suicide itself may have been triggered by a letter the young Broadbent had sent to his friend after he had ‘stolen’ away his girlfriend in his early 20s. Broadbent then sets about discovering the truth of his relationship with his peers, digging up and remembering the past and seeing it from another perspective. The cast are good, including Emily Mortimer and Charlotte Rampling, but the film unfortunately fails to convince.
Opens April 14