This film, the first in a welcome second run of the BBC's British Film Premieres, is an engaging, deftly told tale of marginality, difference, cultural translation and cosmopolitan openness. Mainly set on the North Coast of France, it involves Joanna Scanlan giving a fantastic, deeply thought-out performance as Mary, a white English woman who converted to Islam when marrying her Pakistani partner. There is an especially telling moment when Mary says that she has learned Urdu so that she can practically understand what her husband's family is saying about her: Mary is pragmatically open, learning in order to decipher personal relationships and not to be the unwitting butt of gossip! Mary being employed as a cleaner illuminates the film's clear social class dimension. This is her ideal cover to listen, learn and find out how her husband was here having an affair and, indeed, a child. There is a power to the scene with the memory-capturing cassette tape at the end. Scanlon and script subtly convey Mary's grief, alongside her complicated feelings about what her husband had done. The film has a fairly wistful, upbeat-ish ending, as we see familiar white chalk cliffs and the characters have advanced their knowledge of each other.
Memorably, the film opens with her husband's death. Aptly, the sound disappears. This whole opening scene is one long static observational take. Director Aleem Khan's filmmaking is sedate and with a thoughtful visual style; it suggests and shows, rather than tells. While the final section is certainly more dialogue heavy and verges on the family melodrama, this works, with the film's small ensemble cast: an odd, disparate group of connected people. The film's spaces are extremely well selected: highly apt locations and exemplary production design which has a rare combination of spareness and telling detail. The underscore is there but very sparing and it has a European art house-like deliberation and lack of facile manipulation or telegraphing of the viewers' emotions.
Is "After Love" part of a wider trajectory in British cinema: away from localised British concerns and locations and towards 'Other' forms of identity and overseas locations? Yes, perhaps, and winningly so. There are, probably, a sufficient number of 'rooted' films like BBC Films and Netflix's Bradford through-and-through "Ali and Ava" (2021) to be able to accommodate such fascinating excursions as Khan's film. This is my 200th review for this website, 24 years - to the month - after my first review, of "O Lucky Man!" (1973). This is an infinitely more modest, less bravura, but also in some ways more searching British film than Lindsay Anderson's Brechtian epic, all the more so for how its powerfully particular English southerner Mary experiences French and Pakistani cultures.
Memorably, the film opens with her husband's death. Aptly, the sound disappears. This whole opening scene is one long static observational take. Director Aleem Khan's filmmaking is sedate and with a thoughtful visual style; it suggests and shows, rather than tells. While the final section is certainly more dialogue heavy and verges on the family melodrama, this works, with the film's small ensemble cast: an odd, disparate group of connected people. The film's spaces are extremely well selected: highly apt locations and exemplary production design which has a rare combination of spareness and telling detail. The underscore is there but very sparing and it has a European art house-like deliberation and lack of facile manipulation or telegraphing of the viewers' emotions.
Is "After Love" part of a wider trajectory in British cinema: away from localised British concerns and locations and towards 'Other' forms of identity and overseas locations? Yes, perhaps, and winningly so. There are, probably, a sufficient number of 'rooted' films like BBC Films and Netflix's Bradford through-and-through "Ali and Ava" (2021) to be able to accommodate such fascinating excursions as Khan's film. This is my 200th review for this website, 24 years - to the month - after my first review, of "O Lucky Man!" (1973). This is an infinitely more modest, less bravura, but also in some ways more searching British film than Lindsay Anderson's Brechtian epic, all the more so for how its powerfully particular English southerner Mary experiences French and Pakistani cultures.