LFF 2020: After Love
LFFAfter Love, Aleem Khan’s feature debut, tells a story about Mary (Joanna Scanlan), a Muslim convert who finds out that her late husband led a double life. This world-shattering discovery sends her on a quest across the English Channel to the coastal town of Calais to meet her husband’s mistress. There, she finds many more questions in need of answers pertaining to her own identity, dealing with grief and betrayal, as well as the fundamental ideas of belonging and tethering one’s existence to another person and their culture.
The film opens with an excellent scene where Mary and her husband Ahmed get back home from what could have been a night out or a family function. The camera, positioned on a tripod, records Mary as she makes tea while Ahmed turns on the radio in the sitting room in the back, dancing gleefully for a few seconds before landing in an armchair and disappearing from the view. Mary carries on with her small talk and brings the beverages over. It takes her good few seconds to realize that Ahmed had a heart attack while she was in the kitchen. While she desperately tries to wake him up, the camera starts slowly zooming in, as though to relish in the horror of Mary’s life coming apart on the screen. Shot in an unbroken Haneke-esque take, this scene is meant to be a sensory amuse-bouche. Sadly, in the context of what comes after it, this magnificent scene could have been lifted from a completely different film.
It should come as no surprise that Khan’s film is at least partially inspired by the filmmaker’s own life experiences. While the story itself isn’t necessarily autobiographical in nature, the organic subtlety with which he handles Mary’s turmoil as well as the implied veracity of her dramatic quest ground the entire narrative in tactile, emotionally-charged reality. After all, he did grow up in a culturally-mixed household, which invariably carried over into his screenwriting in the form of character nuance and atmosphere. Had he stuck with this notion – telling a simple and honest story about grief and cultural identity – After Love would have turned out considerably stronger than it eventually did.
The themes of grief and cultural belonging in the face of terrible loss aren’t the only things Aleem Khan is interested in exploring. Although they are central to the narrative, the film quickly moves on to incorporate much more thematic breadth into the fold. Naturally, he brings in the idea of processing betrayal, Mary’s confidence being undermined by her finding out there had been a different woman (Nathalie Richard) in her husband’s life, and a conflict stemming from them meeting face to face. This is additionally topped off with a secondary dramatic arc involving Ahmed’s illegitimate son and the fact he had been coming of age with a part-time father. It is not impossible for a narrative this lean and tonally austere to accommodate all those thematic strands under one roof, but it requires immense skill to pull it off successfully.
Suffice it to say that Aleem Khan has a lot to learn in this department, because After Love builds a narrative similarly to how Rachel Green made a Thanksgiving trifle in a classic episode of Friends. The film looks as though the filmmaker changed his mind halfway through the writing process because what begins as a sombre psychological horror eventually morphs into what could only be described as a Preston Sturges comedy of errors filtered through the aesthetic of a Mike Leigh ascetic drama. While it is appropriately bittersweet where it needs to be, thanks to some truly compelling moments of character intimacy, Khan’s film is occasionally as jarring to the senses and tonally incoherent as a trifle made of ladyfingers, custard, and beef sautéed with peas and onions would be.
However, let it be said that even the most outrageous combination of flavours will find its fans. Fortunately, despite indulging in tonal mismatch and superfluous intrigue of Mary hiding her identity and infiltrating the lives of her husband’s side-family, After Love eventually reconnects with its organic potential and leaves the viewer with at least a semblance of narrative cohesiveness. To that end, Khan employs an image of the Dover cliff eroding and tumbling into the sea as a visual metaphor for a piece of Mary’s world having been chipped away and taken from here. By staging the final scene at the very spot missing a chunk of rock, he teases out the principal mission of his film up to that point, hiding in the crowd of ancillary themes and ideas. While it bites way more than it can chew, After Love is at its core a rumination on grief, loneliness and solace that has its heart in the right place.
