Trailer Review: Ritesh Batra steps it up with The Sense Of An Ending

Ritesh Batra's The Sense Of An Ending trailer works, writes Raja Sen. 

The Sense Of An Ending is a heartbreaking book.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize five years ago, the novel by Julian Barnes is deeply and evocatively devastating -- so much so, in fact, that the original UK hardcover edition (published by Jonathan Cape) had black-edged pages as if in warning. Or mourning.

The trailer for the adaptation of The Sense Of An Ending -- directed by our very own Ritesh Batra -- is just out, and while the film doesn’t look to be skimping on the dramatic perplexity that makes the novel special, the music score used in the trailer seems a tad more optimistic, a tad less grave.

Or is that merely a way to draw us in, perhaps?

It works.

The film looks as intriguing as it does intricate.

Batra has assembled a sparkling cast with the redoubtable Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling in the lead roles, supported by Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery and -- in the key role of young Tony -- a young man named Billy Howle.

Without giving much of the novel away, the story is originally that of an old man finding a diary and using it to ruminate on his youth, and finding out that too much that we imagine to be set in stone is but a fault of the light -- and can be blamed on where we see ourselves standing, when we form the thoughts and when we think back on things.

The protagonist, Tony, wrote a furious letter when he was young, believing he was wronged, and it is a telling detail that the trailer shows only one word of the letter that remains set in stone while perception makes the rest crumble: Permanence.

It is wonderful to see Batra and his lovely debut, The Lunchbox, lead to such ambitious projects as this, and one hopes the film will complement the brilliant book well.

The Sense Of An Ending releases in March 2017.