Hope Gap
Director: William Nicholson

A horrifying act of will is required to end a long marriage. History teacher Edward (Bill Nighy) tells his class how, during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, those too weak to keep up were not only left behind, but also stripped of their clothes by those better able to survive. Is it cruel, he asks his pupils, to save oneself?

While his own emotional survival has become a cruel necessity, he’s not the one who is left abandoned and naked in a freezing ditch to die, which is how Grace (Annette Bening), his wife of 29 years, views her fate.

The marriage, however, has history. Grace justifies the escalating provocations with which she challenges her husband’s habit of conciliation and deflection with the classic abuser’s defence as something “he makes me do”. She’s become a bully. Or perhaps she always was.

Bening perfectly captures Grace’s wide-eyed resort to magical thinking and her apparently guileless inability to recognise the corrosive effects of her own rage, impotence and self-pity, although an instinct for self-preservation stops her losing complete control.