About that fog . . .

A talk with Neil Jordan

Miracles?" says Irish director Neil Jordan. "They don't mean anything, really."

Maybe he's just being cryptic or disingenuous, 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 otherwise. I'm attracted to those kinds of stories. Ambiguous stories that can be interpreted in different ways. Like in The Butcher Boy. Was it the Virgin Mary he saw or was it his imagination?"

One thing Jordan found unambiguous in Greene's semi-autobiographical tale of wartime adultery and regret is the passion. The adulterous lovers Maurice and Sarah, played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, engage in some of the year's hottest sex scenes, which are made more intense by the thud of bombs in the background and the proximity of death. "What attracted me to Greene's novel was that it was a terribly passionate affair, a very erotic story, it explored the relationship in many ways. The state of intensity of their relationship puts them in a different place, where time is suspended, almost like Eden. And the war, because it created the intensity of the moment, because they can be killed at any moment and that added a totality to their commitment. It adds to the eroticism, and the spirituality. Eroticism and spirituality -- you don't think of those as two things that go hand in hand, but they do."

They do especially in the film's central, enigmatic scene. Maurice and Sarah have made love, ignoring a V-1 attack. Maurice stands in front of a stained-glass window that disintegrates from a delayed explosion. What happens next, depending on the point of view, could be a delusion or a miracle, and a promise is made that could be a sign of genuine faith or folly.

"That's what drew me to the story," says Jordan. "It was a love story told from the point of view of an obsessive man infused with jealousy and hatred who's forced to confront the same events from another point of view. Especially that suspended moment which could be interpreted many different ways. Anybody who's experienced death or near death, they always instinctively appeal to a higher power. To me it was entirely rational for her to have done that and that she would have made this promise."

On the matter of miracles, though, Jordan remains neutral; he wants to keep this Affair on a human and not a divine level. "Do I want to stir up any religious issues? No, I don't. I just want to make a love story about the kind of promises people make to each other. And the whole idea of sexual contact, of an affair, and the responsibility people take for each other. This is similar to The Crying Game, in which Stephen Rae made a promise and he has to keep it. In both situations they both make a promise that doesn't give them what they want. But they keep their promises. I find it terribly moving, and I'm not even a religious person."

-- P.K.

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