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If Marriage Story, as stated in this issue's first arts review, is very much a Hollywood movie, Hope Gap is one hundred per cent English. Both films deal with the break-up of a marriage yet each one is steeped in its own culture, resulting in contrasting depictions of what happens when love is betrayed and lost.
While Marriage Story received awards and accolades, the reception Hope Gap received has been mixed. A recurrent criticism is that it is more a stage play than a film. The film is indeed adapted from director William Nicholson's 1999 play, The Retreat from Moscow, and dialogue definitely outweighs action. Rather than a flaw, this could be seen as befitting the characters, two very British middle-class academics, whose marriage seems to lack any form of sensuality or emotion. The film paints an empty marriage built on thin air and filled only with Grace's (Annette Bening) determination to keep it going.
The story is set in the seemingly quiet and provincial seaside town of Seaford. The evocative title refers to a particular part of the beach where the couple's son, Jamie (Josh O'Connor) used to play when he was a child and where the family shared some happiness. After twenty-nine years of marriage, Edward (Bill Nighy) has decided to leave Grace. He has fallen in love with another woman and has asked Jamie, who lives in London, to come for the weekend to comfort his mother when she hears the news.
Stunning landscapes of windblown sand dunes and steep white cliffs are the background to Jamie's narrative which opens and closes the film. Though beautifully shot, the exterior scenes are somewhat repetitive, conveying the stuckness of the relationship and creating a sense of monotony, keeping the