Gang, I’ve just seen ‘The Roses’ and I’m going to deploy my degree. Read on for analysis but also spoilers, in case you haven’t read ‘The War of the Roses’ or seen ‘The War of the Roses (1989)’.

Chance is the finger on the scales of justice. It is the thing that makes life unfair. It is half, perhaps, of the inputs to our lives. The other half is hard work.

If we wish then to succeed we must work. We must work and we must accept that sometimes we can do everything right and still fail.

Let us talk about the role of chance and work in ‘The Roses’.

What is our inciting incident? Chance, and work. Theo has worked hard to get a balcony on a building. It has not gone his way and, to prevent himself from doing something dramatic, he flees to the kitchens where – by chance again – he bumps into Ivy.

Who is moving to America.

And in a moment of – something? – he asks to go with her. And she accepts.

It’s a stroke of incredible good luck for our protagonists. It was, as they reminisce, a good day.

Theo’s grand design fails because of a freak weather event: a piece of bad luck. Ivy’s restaurant takes off because of a stroke of incredible good luck: the same freak weather event. These two events happen in close proximity and yes, of course that’s narratively necessary but also: look at how the characters react. They are led by the events, to joy and resentment respectively. They do not control their reactions. The event is just an event.

The narrative unfolds. Ivy apologises with heart and with honesty and from behind a door – and so does not realise that, by chance, Theo cannot hear her. By chance he stumbles across a beached whale and returns it to the ocean.

And what about the ending! What a stroke of chance that is!

And it occurs after the protagonists reach across the giant gulf they’ve built and for a minute do the work. The work of a relationship is lots of things but I think one of them is building trust and finding the rhythm. That in turn means work – specifically, being as generous as it is humanly possible to be. Perhaps more. It requires us to turn off the easy, lizard-brain response that is lashing out or retreating into ourselves and find the best possible interpretation.

And chance once more has its fingers on the scales there. One of you works up to the apology but the other is too tired or too wired or ate some bad chicken and it’s a swing and a miss. You can do all the right things and you can still fail and the challenge is: can you still be generous? Can you receive what feels in the moment like a rejection and still be generous?

It is a mark of the fact that I am culturally Christian – because Christianity is so embedded in all things to ignore it would be for a dolphin to claim it bore no resemblence to a shark – that I reach for the word ‘caritas’. It is love and kindness without end, even in the face of chance.

In the face of a hair trigger, there is caritas: love that bridges the gulf that until a moment ago had a gun pointed across it.

I think there’s something fantastic in that. A moment of self-examination and digging deep and then the film ends in the most appropriate way that it could. Luck rules our lives in big ways and small ways.

By luck I saw this film because a friend asked if we wanted to go, and we did.

I loved it. And if you read this and see it then – what luck that is.