Director: Joe Wright
"Atonement" starts out with the insistent sound of a typewriter. The keys are tapped in quick succession, building in rhythm and intensity, to create a strangely disquieting score. It's just one of many superb touches to this excellent and confidently made film.
The typewriter belongs to the haughty Briony Tallis (Saoirse Roman), a 13-year-old girl who has just written a play and intends to perform it with her two cousins at a family gathering.
It's a stiflingly hot day in the English countryside. Briony's petulant elder sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) lounges around the grounds of their mansion, smoking, sunbathing, and generally idling the time away.
Briony is secretly in love with Robbie (James McAvoy), the handsome son of a servant who was partially adopted by the Tallis family after his father died, and who is off to study medicine after the summer at the Tallis family's expense.
Briony glances out of the window to see Cecilia taking off her dress by a fountain in the garden in front of Robbie and leaps to the wrong conclusion. We see, shortly afterwards, that Cecilia took her dress off in order to jump into the fountain and retrieve a piece of a broken vase.
The tension is beautifully mounted, exacerbated by the heat and stifling social conventions of 1930s England. The story unfolds in a series of overlapping scenes which only gradually reveal their meaning in a sort of time-lapse narrative
Later that night, Briony sees someone raping her cousin in the bushes. She falsely swears to the police that it was Robbie, out of childish spite towards him. Robbie is then promptly arrested and carted off to prison, his guilt virtually confirmed by his lowly social position.
The story then cuts to the war. Robbie has gone straight from prison to the front in France and is trying to get back to the beach for the mass retreat of British troops. Cecilia lives in squalor in London, having turned her back on her family, while Briony, several years older now, is a nurse, consumed with remorse for what she did that fateful night.
"Atonement" is an extraordinarily powerful film with an almost old-fashioned emotional intensity to it. It is strangely dreamlike to begin with, and utterly nightmarish to end with. It also contains one of the most haunting images of war I have ever seen in a movie without having to show a single drop of blood. Most impressive.
Now showing in Latvia and Lithuania. Opens in Estonia Jan. 11.
