Friday, February 25, 2011

Atonement





















Robbie: “Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once walked across a Surrey park at dusk in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life; the man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume.”





Briony: “I never made that journey to Balham. So the scene in which I confess to them is invented, imagined. And, in fact, could never have happened… because Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on the first of June 1940, the last day of the evacuation… And I was never able to put things right with my sister Cecilia… because she was killed on the 15th of October, 1940 by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham tube station. So my sister and Robbie never had the time together they both so longed for and deserved, which, ever since, I’ve…always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that?”
Briony: I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they had lost out on in life. I’d like to think this wasn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.
(via http://movieoftheday.tumblr.com/ )

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