Neil Jordan, GB, 1999

Religion has reared its head in a surprising number of films lately, from the button-pushing Dogma to farther-flung pictures like Jane Campion's psychodrama Holy Smoke! and the African allegory Genesis, among others. Some attribute this to turn-of-the-millennium anxiety, but I prefer the theory that aging baby-boomers are producing a larger and more receptive audience for mystical musings, thereby encouraging filmmakers as different as Kevin Smith and Luc Besson to explore (or exploit) whatever spiritually inclined inklings they may happen to have. Cannes ratified the trend last spring with awards honoring Bruno Dumont's bizarre L'Humanite and Manoel de Oliveira's exquisite The Letter, and Amos Gita:f's pungent politico-religious drama Kadosh is opening soon.

All this provides a good atmosphere for recalling the late Graham Greene, not only as a gifted novelist, prolific screenwriter, and influential film critic, but also a Roman Catholic convert who took what today's euphemizers call "faith-based issues" as seriously as any popular writer of his day. Regarded as one of his most conspicuously religious books, The End of the Affair was filmed by Edward Dmytryk in a largely forgotten 1955 version, and in ways its an unexpected vehicle for a filmmaker with interests as decidedly secular as Neil Jordan's have seemed in pictures like, say. Mona Lisa and Michael Collins.

Jordan likes to veer in unexpected directions, though, and a soupcon of the supernatural has glimmered through several of his pictures, from early offerings like Angel and The Company of Wolves to the awful High Spirits and the underrated We're No Angels, not to mention Interview With the Vampire and In Dreams, his other movie of this highly productive year. Greene's novel plugs directly into Jordan's longtime fascination with complicated romance, deeply held secrets, the effects of physical and emotional violence, and the wavering lines between love, loyalty, and betrayal. It also allows him to pursue his more rarified interests by expanding a familiar love triangle situation through the addition of none other than God. suitably invisible but every bit as real and involved as the merely human figures of the tale.

God enters the picture only after Jordan, in an artfully crafted screenplay that draws on the book's use of multiple perspectives, has devoted many scenes to setting up a more conventional kind of story The central character is Maurice Bendrix, an English author of the World War 11 era (the novel has been called one of Greene,, most personal) who can't stop pining for his erstwhile lover Sarah even though two years have passed since she abruptly left him and returned to her sexless marriage. Learning of a new liaison shes apparently engaged in, he hires a detective named Parkis to ferret out the details. This leads to the discovery of Sarah's diary and the pivotal event of the time-- jumping plot. Resting with Sarah after a tryst during the London blitz, Bendrix is blasted by a direct bomb hit on his house. Horrified beyond endurance, the nonreligious Sarah prostrates herself and prays for his survival, promising to sacrifice their relationship if God will let him live. Bendrix ambles into the room a moment later, and Sarah feels bound by her vow to a deity she thought she didn't believe in. Only the enigmatic results of Parkis's sleuthing illuminate all this for Bendrix years later, leading to a bittersweet denouement involving Sarah's death and what appears to be a bona-fide miracle born of a faith she couldn't shake and that Hendrix himself may now be infected by.

One trusts Columbia Pictures never contemplated a promo campaign asking us to shush about the secrets of this movie the way we dutifully did for The Q) ing Game seven years ago, The two pictures have notable similarities, though, and Jordan's progression from physical to metaphysical ambiguity - coupled with his perennial use of unexpected revelations as a narrative device - suggests that for him the supernatural realm is ultimately the richest hunting ground for the riddles, conundrums, and enigmas that pique his artistic interests more than answers, solutions, and neatly tied story packages.

This doesn't mean Jordan is coming out as what Paul Schrader would call a "transcendental" filmmaker in the Ozu-Bresson-- Dreyer mold. As different as those canonical auteurs are in their ways of contemplating the spiritual, their greatest works reflect a shared conviction that a supremely materialist medium like cinema has no means of approaching invisible realms except through rigorous scrutiny of the physical world; hence the radical difference between their frequently austere masterpieces (so rooted in materiality that Schrader's notion of "transcendence" often seems ill applied) and the highminded sentimentality found in so many of Hollywood's allegedly religious epics. Jordan makes his stand between these extremes, carving out a distinctly romantic position - helped by cinematographer Roger Pratt's moody deployments of cramped interiors and rainy exteriors that uses narrative impetuosity and character ambivalence as surrogates for Bressonian strictness and Hollywood spectacle alike. It's a risky maneuver that courts affectation or outright pretentiousness, but Jordan's clear sincerity brings it off beautifully. Still to be seen is whether the over-the-top ironist of In Dreams and The Butcher Boy has undergone a deep-down conversion or just taken a temporary detour from his usual sardonic ways.

On the earthbound level of production values, the movie stands with Jordan's most polished work. His screenplay reproduces the multilayered modernism of Greene's novel while making plot changes that effectively streamline the chronologically complex story, and the acting harmonizes perfectly with his ripely romantic tone. Ralph Fiennes continues to deepen his screen image as Bendrix, a challenging character who's called upon to love and hate in equal measure and at the same time. Julianne Moore shows her usual mastery of everything from emotional nuance to the niceties of Britspeak, and Stephen Rea is excellent as her washed-out husband. They help make Jordan's unorthodox drama at once sexy, saintly, and absorbing.

David Sterritt