AFTER LOVE: Waiting On The Awful Truth
The first time Mary and Genevieve meet, the tension is similar in weight and social implication to Hortense (Marianne Jeane-Baptiste) and Cynthia’s (Brenda Blethyn) meet in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. Two women, tied together in unexpected ways, to a man who has passed away. Genevieve however, does not know of Mary’s relationship with Ahmed the way Cynthia does of Hortense. Mary keeps hers a secret. This is the fundamental difference between Leigh’s film and Aleem Khan’s After Love. The former employs secret lives and histories as open jars ready to be excavated jointly. Khan uses them as suspenseful plot-points to be revealed over time for maximum narrative impact. The former is called Secrets & Lies but is actually a film about love and loss, the latter is called After Love but it actually a film about secrets and lies.
Love, Loss, Secrets, and Lies
Mary, a British widow, falls into a peculiar situation where she finds out about her Pakistani husband’s second life he’s been living across the English Channel in the French port town of Calais with a mistress named Genevieve. Mary goes to find but when they meet, she is unable to speak and everything is left hanging in the air. Instead, the fact that Mary is a Muslim convert and wearing a hijab makes Genevieve assume she’s the maid assigned to help her clean her home before she moves into her new place. Mary quietly goes along with the situation. It’s a strange plot twist that verges on being downright comical – like the Seinfeld sitcom idea where one driver is sentenced by a judge to become another driver’s butler when they get into a crash.
Khan leaves the tension and withheld information about Mary’s real identity as a critical source of narrative thrust throughout the movie. It’s an effective tactic but feels a tad manipulative in a film that also tries to create empathy for Mary’s loss. We see her look through the house for clues of Ahmed’s existence there. We see her show common signs of grief, some practical, like listening to her husband’s voicemails over and over on her phone, and some cinematic, like lying down on the beach and letting the surf drench her salwar-kameez (South Asian women’s traditional garb). Despite these moments of longing, the movie is too dependent on the carefully economical placement of dialogue and character interaction that all seem mechanized to inch the story towards a very predictable conclusion.
A Calculated Reveal
The clumsiness that comes off when the ultimate reveal is had – something akin to the end of Cristian Petzold’s Pheonix as an abrupt gesture of revelation purposefully meant to elicit a shocked response – turns both Mary, Genevieve, and Genevieve’s son into confused vectors of contempt who failed Ahmed’s legacy in each their own unique ways. It struck me as a little too calculated of a moment and resultingly inorganic.
The contrast from Petzold’s film, where the self-centered and callously apathetic nature of the oblivious party to the tragedy the protagonist faces makes the denial of information a justified weapon of identity wielded by the protagonist, in After Love it feels little more than a structural ploy, for there wouldn’t be a movie at all without it.
Conclusion
It’s a testament to both Joanna Scanlan (Mary) and Nathalie Richard (Genevieve) that they manage to keep their characters from being totally at the behest of a clever narrative by really digging into their characters. Scanlan embodies the sensitive and hurt nature of Mary, finding the right sensibilities to turn from ire to sarcasm to self-pity. Richard hits the balance of resentment and patronization within Genevieve. The film frustratingly wrangles these characters in a staged and muted confrontation rather than having their strong characterizations do the work of navigating their difficult and confounding connection to one another. After Love, serviceably directed but only marginally engrossing, feels too much like a long wait for a heavy hammer to fall.
After Love is releasing in select theaters in the U.S. on January 20th, 2023
Watch After Love
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