The film's primary theme is quite explicit: Our memory shapes our lives into a narrative that may serve to deceive ourselves as well as others. We remember what we want to, to serve what we need. The flashbacks present carefully nuanced versions of the same scene.
Though retired, Tony still runs a camera repair shop that his ex-wife Margaret sees is a shrine to his first great love, Veronica, who gave him his first Leica as well. Hardened by that loss, he remains closed off from his emotions and distant from Margaret and their daughter Susie.
The latter's pregnancy draws them closer, especially when he assists her pre-natal class. But he does not fully connect to his emotions until he learns the truth about his loss of Veronica and confronts his ugly response at the time. When Veronica left him for his more impressive and confident friend Adrian, Tony sent them a vituperative note, cursing their progeny.
The death of Veronica's mother Sarah and her bequest of Adrian's diary leads to the breakthrough in Tony's understanding, even though Veronica burns the book before he gets it. Tony learns that Adrian's mysterious suicide was his response to his having impregnated his lover (a motive he suggested for an ill-fated classmate). But that was Sarah, not Veronica. Sarah's sexual appeal was first noted by her son, then by Tony and apparently by Adrian, who succumbed. Tony seems to have carried his attraction unacknowledged, for his Margaret resembles Sarah, especially in her hair colour and style and in her brisk firm character. In one memory of Tony's departure he remembers Sarah's son ushering her into the house. Later he corrects that: she stands alone, sending him a furtive flat wave from below her waist.
Sarah's bequest surfaces Tony's obsession with Veronica, to the point of stalking her. He is appalled by the note he'd written, all the more when he learns that Adrian's son Adrian (Veronica's brother, not son) is mentally afflicted, as if bearing Tony's curse.
So far the film is the British version of the traditional "Why men just don't get it": They over-intellectualize. Their thinking paralyzes their feeling. (Well, now that you ask, the American version is "Cuz a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." Their action precludes sentiment.)
But the film is even more interesting as a symptom of current British culture. It's an exercise in national nostalgia. In its exclusive focus on the white privileged public (i.e. private) school landed gentry, it could have been made in its present form at any time since 1950. There is not a scintilla of reference to any current social issue in Britain.
Unless. Unless the film embodies the nation performing the same transforming memory trick the characters do. As Tony looks back complacently upon his college days the film ignores the current complexities to fantasize a simpler, more controllable time. The film then plays as a Downton Abbey version of Brexit: the desire to recover a lost glory and innocence.
Not that the period's innocence holds up. In that privileged patriarchy the mother is driven to find sexual satisfaction among her daughter's beaux. That lordly estate harbours a considerable embarrassment and hypocrisy. But the Edwardian grandeur and dignity persist.
The film's archaic atmosphere and plot are especially significant when we note the director is not British himself, but Ritesh Batra from India. In his earlier feature, The Lunchbox, an elderly man and a young housewife develop a fantasy relationship, in the realistic streets of Mumbai, through notes left in the daily delivery of a lunchbox. In his second feature the Indian director reimagines the British colonial power as again an obstruction to feeling and the honest exchange of emotions. The ending the film's title senses is not just to Tony's illusions but to the British as well.
