Atonement

I'm not crazy about Kiera Knightly but someone made me a copy of the movie and I just felt like watching something I hadn't seen already for a change. It's been in my apartment for months. As it turns out, at least in my opinion, Kiera and James McAvoy are not the actors who make this film watchable. The heart of Atonement is the character who does the atoning; Briony Tallis played pretty much to perfection by the three actresses who play her at the different phases of her life. The entire beautifully shot movie is basically her own partly fictional retelling of the events of one day when as an adolescent girl she mistakenly set into motion the false persecution of an innocent man. Personally, I think the whole thing could have been avoided through clear explanations of all the things she'd witnessed which lead up to her being convinced that something was going on which was not. But it was the 30s and I guess rich white British people in the 30s were very sexually repressed.

There was one small scene in particular which really moved me where Briony in her twenties and volunteering as a nurse in the Second World War finally finds her sister played by Knightly whose lover she had sent away by falsely accusing him
of rape. She finds her so she can apologize to her because she has just discovered after many years that she was completely wrong. Kieras's character Cecelia let's her into her apartment and offers her a cigarette, holding them out to her as if they were the last offering of friendship she could spare. Briony takes one as if she is accepting the last drops of kindness her sister feels she can give. And the way Briony holds the cigarette, you know she doesn't smoke, never has and doesn't care about smoking. But she takes it because her sister gave it to her and she knows she may never give her another thing again. The desperate need she has to be forgiven is made palpable just in the way she holds that cigarete.