Sin is Green by Aldrin Calimlim Atonement...

Atonement (2007)
D: Joe Wright
S: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave

Ian McEwan took all of three pages in his award-winning 2001 novel, Atonement, to narrate the painstaking, Goldilocks-like process aristocrat Cecilia Tallis goes through in choosing a dress for a formal dinner party in her family’s English countryside home in the summer of 1935. After trying on a black crêpe de chine dress, which she thought was somewhat funereal, and a pink moiré silk dress, which made her look like Shirley Temple, Cecilia finally chooses something that is just right: “She reached for […] her green backless post-finals gown. As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the bias cut through the silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror.”

In the acclaimed 2007 film adaptation by Joe Wright, that mermaid, Cecilia, is portrayed by Keira Knightley, beautiful and regal as always, in a loosely fitting evening gown created by Academy Award-nominated costume designer Jacqueline Durran. The film, deprived as it is of the luxury of time, doesn’t devote a considerable amount of frames to the depiction of the pre-dinner deliberation Cecilia has with her wardrobe, but it does get the dress right. As in McEwan’s book, the dress which the sartorially inclined principal character picks in Wright’s Atonement is green and backless. Thanks to Duran’s expertise, it also bears the same effect to its wearer (making her feel “sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure.”), made evident as soon as Cecilia puts it on and its hemline drops to the floor. It’s a far cry from what she was wearing—or rather, not wearing—just a couple of scenes back, although, to be fair to her clothes then, she wasn’t about to attend a formal gathering.

A couple of scenes back, Cecilia is about to fill a vase with water at the fountain near the Tallis mansion. On the way there she meets Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son and a childhood friend of hers who, like Cecilia, is home from university for the summer break. For reasons not entirely unknown, reasons made more pronounced by the blazing hot weather, until this moment they’ve been avoiding each other. Walking toward the fountain, he in his gardening clothes and she in a diaphanous floral summer dress, they talk about her preference for Fielding over Richardson, then arrive at the subject of his scholarship under her father, at which point their conversation starts to feel awkward and delicate. At their destination he offers to help her with the vase, she refuses, he grabs the vase by its handle, she turns away, and just then a portion of the vase snaps and a fragment drops into the fountain. Furious, Cecilia strips down to her undergarments and goes into the water to retrieve the detached piece of porcelain. When she emerges, Robbie can only stare at her, wet and nearly naked.

Through an upstairs window, the foregoing episode of attenuated desire is witnessed by Briony (Saoirse Ronan), Cecilia’s sister who, having only seen and not heard the encounter, fails to comprehend the circumstances of the couple’s unusual acts. And it’s not the only time that she does. Later in the evening, minutes before the dinner party, to which Robbie is also invited, Briony again becomes privy to a moment of intimacy between Robbie and Cecilia. In the home library, whose only source of illumination at the time is a small desk lamp, Briony sees—or thinks she sees—Robbie assaulting Cecilia, the latter seemingly splayed by the former against the bookshelves. In truth, the couple have just confessed their love to each other and have just begun making love—almost fully clothed at that, he in his sharpest black suit and she in her backless green dress, which proves to be slippery but not completely impregnable and secure—when they are discovered by Briony, in a simple dress so white as to hint of her supposed innocence and naivete. At night’s end, a crime that will take decades to atone for is committed, but it’s not Robbie nor Cecilia who’s responsible for it. On the contrary, they are the victims, and Briony, with her intense eyes and propensity for fabricating realities, is the unknowing perpetrator.

It’s not hard to understand why a great deal is invested in perfecting that flowing green dress, on top of getting the other articles of clothing used in the film right and making sure that they lend an air of authenticity to the film’s different settings. That utterly divine gown symbolizes a number of things, not the least of which are love, lust, and longing shared by the central couple. It also reflects envy on the part of Briony, even though it’s not until much later that she realizes its hold on her self. Worn by Cecilia during the film’s most pivotal series of scenes and complemented by a white gold bracelet and a pair of cage-front sandals, it all but becomes a character itself.

But Durran’s exceptional costume design is only the first hint of Atonement’s strong stylistic leanings. Dario Marianelli’s uniquely percussive score, Seamus McGarvey’s literally brilliant cinematography, and Sarah Greenwood’s pattern- and detail-obsessed production design also contribute greatly to the film’s artistry. One need only watch the five-minute tracking shot of the Dunkirk beaches prior to the evacuation of Allied soldiers in the Second World War toward the end of the film’s second act to see, hear, and feel the aforementioned aspects of filmmaking and then some at breathtaking play.

That spectacularly long sequence, so effective in its illustration of the misery and absurdity of war, is also suggestive of the devastating effects of Briony’s words and actions on that fateful summer day in 1935 in the lives of Cecilia, who is now a wartime nurse, and Robbie, who is one of the soldiers seeking refuge in the harbor of Dunkirk—both desperately holding on to a mutual promise (“Come back. Come back to me.”) made on the same night they consummated their love in the library, he in his sharpest black suit and she in her backless green dress.