The Lunchbox director’s debut film is creating ripples in the West before its official release
Subhash K Jha (DNA; December 18, 2016)

Ritesh Batra’s film The Sense Of An Ending based on Julian Barnes’ novel has been selected by Variety magazine among the 10 films and directors to watch out for in 2016. Clubbing Batra for this singular honour with some of the best works of the year — no Indian director has been thus honoured in recent times — Variety places Batra and his film alongside Julia Ducourno’s shocking horror film Raw and theatre’s veteran director William Oldroyd’s screen adaptation of Lady Macbeth.

The Sense Of An Ending will open the 28th Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 2, 2017. Ritesh is understandably pleased, but habitually calm about the honour. “One doesn’t know what the outcome will be when one sets off to make a film. The Sense Of An Ending was completed in June. Shooting with actors like Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling was very enriching.”

Batra got to work with the legendary litterateur Julian Barnes. Says Ritesh, “Barnes was on the project helping us all through. It is an interesting challenge to adapt the novel. We couldn’t just take the book and put it on screen.

We had to search for the centre of the novel and place it in the film. And since I was involved with the writing, I didn’t feel the brunt of the cultural shift from Mumbai in The Lunchbox to England in The Sense Of An Ending.”

Batra says the film moves quite a way away from the novel. “If you’ve read the novel it’s actually quite short. There were lots of unspoken feelings and emotions between the lines which we had to dig out. We had to amplify the emotions. It was an amazing experience to work on the development of the script with Julian Barnes.”