Over the next week or so I'm posting edited extracts from an extended analysis I did a few years ago of Christopher Hampton's script ATONEMENT.
The Mighty Lie
CREDIT SEQUENCE
The SOUND of a typewriter, irregularly struck, now fluent, now creating an urgent rhythm that forms the percussive element of the opening score.
A doll’s house, in the form of the Tallis house, an enormous Victorian Gothic pile. The CAMERA moves from room to room, from the nursery and spare bedrooms on the second floor, to the main bedrooms on the first floor, where puppet versions of mother, daughter, son and baby sister are neatly ordered, to the ground floor with its library, drawing room, dining room and kitchen.
Finally the CAMERA moves to the hall through which a young gardener puppet wheels a wheelbarrow.
The SOUND of a typewriter, irregularly struck, now fluent, now creating an urgent rhythm that forms the percussive element of the opening score.
A doll’s house, in the form of the Tallis house, an enormous Victorian Gothic pile. The CAMERA moves from room to room, from the nursery and spare bedrooms on the second floor, to the main bedrooms on the first floor, where puppet versions of mother, daughter, son and baby sister are neatly ordered, to the ground floor with its library, drawing room, dining room and kitchen.
Finally the CAMERA moves to the hall through which a young gardener puppet wheels a wheelbarrow.
From the very first line of the script we are reminded that this is a fiction, something created, something written. The puppets - all major characters we are about to meet - belong to Briony. We are being told that she is in charge of what we are about to see, while the worrying reduction of life to a child's game hints at the disastrous events about to unfold.
Briony’s tales form the backbone of the scenes at the Tallis household. In the grotto2, she writes of a princess, the black-hearted ‘Sir Romulus Turnball’ (Robbie Turner) and ‘the one with red hair’(Lola).3 Sadly for the other characters this is not the last time Briony melds fact with fiction. These early experiments pave the way to the false accusation of rape that so ruins Robbie and Cecilia's life. The power of fiction sweeps all before it with devastating effect.
When the script leaves the Tallis estate, Briony and her fiction may be triumphant but they are both villains. The rest of the script seeks the rehabilitation of them both.
Stories of different kinds fill the second act. The sequence in Northern France is punctuated by flashbacks to Briony’s childhood “fall” into the river (itself of course a fiction) as well as more recent meetings between Robbie and Cecilia in London. These form a sort of narrative - they are, as Robbie states, ‘our story’4. His accidental encounter with a cinema showing melancholy romance Quai des Brumes provides a subtle underscoring to this.5
Meanwhile, Briony's time as a nurse in London sees the eighteen-year old watch propaganda films in the hospital day room and spend her nights writing.6 But it is in her nursing of a dying French soldier that we see the first real rehabilitation of fiction. In this moving scene, Briony plays along with the man’s heart-breaking delusions, pretending to be his sweetheart to ease his final moments. The lie is an act of kindness.7 It is a milestone on fiction's journey from the malicious acts of Briony’s childhood towards the ultimate rewriting of history that sees the Older Briony give Robbie and Cecilia their happy ending.
References
1. Hampton, Atonement, p. 1
2. The location of this scene is significant, given that it is in the grotto that Briony will witness Lola’s “rape” and concoct the fiction of Robbie’s guilt.
3. Hampton, Atonement, p. 22
4. Hampton, Atonement, p. 54
5. Hampton, Atonement, p. 59
6. Hampton, Atonement, p. 67-9 and p. 78
7. Hampton, Atonement, p. 73-8
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