Enduring Love (2004)

Synopsis: A man dies from falling from a balloon, after several other men who were trying to keep the balloon down by hanging from it let go of it. One of the surviving men develops a crush for another one of them and starts stalking him relentlessly.
Appraisal: A rare case of a film of which I have read the novel on which it is based. From what I recall, it is a perfectly faithful adaptation. The criticism I make is valid for book and film alike. First, there is the fact that this is actually two unrelated short stories very poorly amalgamated into a novel. Second, while the first short story ("the balloon accident") is rather good, both in literary and in cinematic terms, the second one ("the stalker") is definitely weak in several aspects; the character of the stalker is not given much depth or consistency; the film practically uses it to focus on the stalked man's reactions, and is not very good at that; add to it that there is yet another subplot about the dead man's widow, which is there just to add to the book's size and to the film's length, and you have a film with individual sparks of intelligence scattered through it, that don't make for a solid whole.
Rating: 48