humps her on the sitting-room floor within earshot of her
husband. ("Will he hear?" he asks. "He wouldn't recognize the sound," she
answers.) So begins a five-year fling abetted by Henry's obtuseness and Nazi
air raids.

Quick work even by today's standards, but already Affair has grown
cubist. Told in elaborate flashbacks, with the same incidents repeated from
different points of view with mounting irony and rueful insight, it begins with
a post-war, post-affair frame tale in which Maurice, bumping into Henry in the
rain (a recurrent fallacy that grows too pathetic), learns that he suspects
Sarah of infidelity. As this would entail her being unfaithful to him as
well, Maurice perversely goes ahead with Henry's half-hearted notion of hiring
a detective, Mr. Parkis (Ian Hart), to check up on his wife.

Although admittedly prompted by a "devil" within him,but it's hard to believe that
the man who made Danny Boy and The Butcher Boy, not to mention
The Miracle, would deny the importance of divine intervention. Indeed,
his latest film, an adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The End of the
Affair, involves not one but two instances of the miraculous, and their
ironic consequences.

"A lot of the stories I choose, even when I write them, are about characters
who are confronted by things they don't understand," Jordan explains. "They
don't know what they are really facing but they assume they are going down a
logical path. Like in The Crying Game. The character played by Stephen
Rea assumes he's in love with a woman but he's really a man. Or Mona
Lisa -- Bob Hoskins thinks he's on the right path with Cecily Tyson but he
learns