(2007) Of the films I've seen that were released in 2007, this is the big and serious one - beautiful and emotionally powerful, eloquent and individualistic, taking wing on moments and memories above a disaster on the beaches of Dunkirk: directed by Joe Wright, screenplay adapted by Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan's novel, cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, with original score from Dario Marianelli.

It's 1935 in England on the sprawling Tallis estate as 13-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is finishing typing on a Corona her first play, The Trials of Arabella. Sixty or seventy years later Briony Tallis (Vanessa Redgrave) is being interviewed following the publication of her 21st novel - her last, she says, because she is dying of dementia, although it might just as well be considered her first, since she has been trying to write it ever since she was eighteen - Atonement, autobiographical except for ("honesty or reality") one fictional incident.

While her twin cousins and their teenage sister Lola Quincey (Juno Temple), who insists on being Arabella, take a break from their rehearsal of the play, Briony witnesses from the upper window her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), removing her dress, getting into the fountain, and re-emerging in front of Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the family's housekeeper.

Later Robbie hands Briony a message in an envelope, asking a favor of her to deliver it to her sister. Robbie, having made several attempts at typing an apology for his awkward conduct at the fountain that afternoon, realizes too late that he has given Briony the wrong missive. Opening and reading it before handing it over to Cecilia, Briony then asks Lola: "What's the worst word you can possibly imagine?"

Cecilia's older brother Lionel and his friend, Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch), arrive as had been expected (the play had been intended as a performance in his honor). Finding her sister's star earring on the floor, Briony picks it up and takes it into the library where she finds Robbie pressing into Cecilia against the bookcases in flagrante delicto.

Soon after the twins, Jackson and Pierrot, go missing, leaving a note behind that they are running away. While search parties set out to find the pair, Briony on her own with a torch (flashlight) stumbles upon Lola with a man in a carnal embrace. The police are summoned to whom Brony positively identifies the sex maniac as Robbie. Cecilia urges caution at taking her younger sister's word: "She's rather fanciful." Unaware of what has happened in his absence, Robbie returns with the two twins safe and sound.

Four years later Robbie and two comrades in arms are in northern France, separated from the British army in retreat from the Germans. Taking emotional sustenance from the letters Cecilia had sent him and memories of their last days together while she was a ward sister in a London hospital, having left her family - their promises to each other to start over, her plea of "Come back to me" - drive him forward, leading the others to the shore at Dunkirk where the remainder of defeated British forces await transport across the Channel.

The scene is chaotic even without Robbie's hallucinating: obsessed with his singular objective of being reunited with Cecilia, to "Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame," he rambles about where soldiers are camped amid an abandoned carnival with a Ferris wheel in the background.

Back in London in the evenings while training at St Thomas to become a nurse, Briony (Romola Garai), age 18, types on her Corona, as she tells her friend Fiona, a complicated story from her childhood of something she saw but misunderstood; she also writes a letter to Cecilia: "I can't escape from what I did and what it meant," asking for permission to visit her. The visit never occurred though Briony invents it as a "final act of kindness."

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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