I've always thought it was some bit about coming to terms with the sadness of this situation he is in because something in Briony that was disconnected with reality, he is connecting with her in that moment.
I am not quite sure if class also factors into it in this scene.
Does anyone have any other thoughts on this scene? It's very beautiful and I still feel like there is more there than I am getting.
IMO I think it was a shot of hopelessness and erasing the last sense of innocence Robbie had left.
shareI think that's probably right.
I hate to bring up the book because the film has to stand on its own, but Atonement is such a great novel I have to consider it. In the novel there is no segue from the dead girls to seven years earlier when Robbie saves Briony in the river. There is no scene of dead girls, period.
I think Joe Wright put it in to give a quick emotional punch to what in the novel is a long trek to the beach with myriad smaller episodes, though there was one scene in which Robbie attempts to save a mother and child in the middle of a bombing/strafing run by a German Stuka only to see them blown to bits. That scene could have made it to the film.
In the movie, Robbie sees the dead girls and then thinks of the time Briony jumped in the river.
The novel is different; Robbie is just walking on the road along with Nace and Nettle past dead bodies when he goes into a reverie about Celia. He begins thinking how, when the war is over, Cee will probably resume relations with her family and that includes Briony. How would he deal with that considering the last time he thought about Briony it was a fantasy of her impaled on the end of his bayonet? Then we have the river flashback.
But I do think Wright wanted to make a connection between the betrayed innocence of the dead girls and Briony, but I can't really tell you why.
Interresting.
I have not read the book and I have been wondering why the scene with the dead girls was there. I only saw it as a warcrime moment and did not make a connection to anything else.
I have been wondering about the time in France though. Was that basically also a part of the novel Briony wrote at the end of her life,... or was that a portrait of what really happened with Robbie at in France? So besides the fact he died in France, is everything we see him do in France made up as part of the novel or what realy happened to him over there?
The only new part of the novel Briony wrote toward the end of her life was the Balham flat scene that has Robbie still alive. It also affords him his chance to punish her.
Regarding the time Robbie spent in France, if you remember in the movie, Nettle takes Robbie's letters from Celia off his dead body. In the book Briony notes Nettle gave them to her as she was putting the book together. Celia's letters from Robbie would likely have been left behind in Cee's flat.
Briony pieced together Robbie's wartime life from those. Even the tea room scene, the truly last time Robbie and Cee saw each other, would have been pieced together from their letters.
The rest is explained in both book and movie: Briony researched the conditions in France leading up the evacuation at Dunkirk. What she couldn't get from Robbie's and Cee's letters she made up based on what she learned in her studies.
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