Enduring Love (2004)

A shared experience of the extraordinary can create a bonding effect between two people, creating intimate knowledge in persons who don’t even know one another’s names. Ask any pair of former strangers who’ve spent an evening together in a lonely lifeboat. They have a commonality that separates them from the rest of the world and unites them. Enduring Love (2004), adapted from the unsettling novel by Ian McEwan, explores the connection of two would-be rescuers who released themselves from the mooring lines of a runaway hot air balloon and witnessed together a third rescuer carried to the heights and dropped to his death. Manifestly, the pair of survivors is subject to a whole range of emotional second guessing that is alien to the bulk of humanity. Still, when one of the two refuses to curb his expanding infatuation with his unwilling and unwitting partner, a painful sundering is surely on the way.