Return to Montauk review – beached affair takes time to connect

Volker Schlöndorff’s scalding film of The Tin Drum shared the Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979. The director turns 78 next month and is no longer at the peak of his powers. But Return to Montauk proves that he still has it in him to startle and wrongfoot an audience.

What appears to be a clunky, tasteful, middle-aged rehash of Before Sunset, with two former lovers reunited after one of them writes a novel about their affair, turns out at the eleventh hour to have a sting in its tail. Schlöndorff and the novelist Cólm Toibín wrote the screenplay, which is adapted in part from the memoir Montauk by the late Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, to whom the picture is dedicated. All three men have in one sense taken a leaf out of another book – or, to be precise, a short story, since the picture owes its killer ending to James Joyce’s The Dead. Irishness makes itself felt also in a perky turn by Bronagh Gallagher (The Commitments, Pulp Fiction) and a cameo from Toibín himself, who is seen grinning on the steps of the New York Public Library.

Max (Stellan Skarsgård) is in Manhattan to promote his latest book, a partly fictionalised memoir called The Hunter and the Hunted, which includes reminiscences about a romance that slipped through his fingers. The object of his affection was Rebecca (Nina Hoss), who just happens to be living and working as a lawyer in the city. When he turns up at her swish apartment, she is less than impressed. “You’ve put on weight,” she says. “I told the cats you’d be thinner.”

After thawing a little, she invites him to accompany her to the Hamptons at the weekend, where she is scheduled to view a holiday home that she’s thinking of buying. She had a place before, she admits, but put it back on the market after only using it a few times. Audiences would be forgiven at this point for wondering where exactly the appeal might lie in a story about the property woes of the extravagantly wealthy. The early scenes have already tested our patience by appearing to suggest that a self-absorbed nitwit like Max is fascinating purely by dint of being a novelist. Ever noticed that it’s usually novelists advancing that argument?

Besides, there are more promising characters in the margins. Max’s mentor Walter is played by Niels Arestrup, that switchblade of a man with nicotine-yellow locks, who was so hypnotically brutish in A Prophet; he lends Walter a distracted, impatient manner which hints at buried secrets. And when Rebecca mentions that she buys bespoke toiletries made by two lesbians in Connecticut “who talk to you and then tell you what soap you are”, it will be a tolerant viewer indeed who doesn’t think: They sound colourful! Couldn’t the film be about them instead?

But as Return to Montauk hits the 80-minute mark, and the waves crashing on the beach generate almost as much froth and foam as there has been in the script, the tone turns suddenly overcast. Max’s earlier flippancy (“Never believe anything a writer tells you,” he had joked) is challenged by Rebecca, who demands: “Tell me for once something that’s true.” Until that point, it’s possible to wonder why Nina Hoss, who has been so complex and surprising in films for Christian Petzold such as Yella and Phoenix, was drawn to this rather plain and snippy role. In the space of two scenes, the penny drops and the attraction becomes clear.

Whether the ending justifies the journey is another matter. Toibín’s Brooklyn, which was adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby, also took a circuitous route to its painful payoff, but at least there were rich and telling details along the way and the characters were not borderline insufferable. Nothing really rings true in Return to Montauk until the pain breaks through and the tears start to flow. Perhaps that’s the point. The film-makers should accept, though, that not everyone will want to put up with Max for an entire movie just to see the smug smile wiped off his face at the end.