Mixed emotions
THE AFTERMATH Alexander Skarsgård and Keira Knightley’s passionate post-war affair…
On a biting February day in 2017, Teasers is trudging through the mud on the outskirts of Hamburg, when we spot a house rising through dripping fir trees. Its cream turrets with red-top roofs are forbidding, but inside even more dramatic scenes are taking shape, as director James Kent orchestrates post-war tension filming The Aftermath. “We’ve had some really heavy scenes,” he reveals. “Extremely emotional.”
That comes with the territory of adapting Rhidian Brook’s novel, which sees Brit Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) heading to Hamburg in 1946 to reunite with her colonel husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), only to discover he has permitted the house’s previous owners, German widower Stefan (Alexander Skarsgård) and his 16year-old daughter (Flora Thiemann), to remain there, living in the attic.
Today, Knightley and Skarsgård are filming in the wood-panelled drawing room, where a grand piano sits under a golden chandelier. As Thiemann plays the piano, Knightley stops in the hall, a haunted look crossing her face. After “Cut!”, Knightley resumes chewing gum. “We won’t say ‘perfect’,” Kent jokes, but he doesn’t line up another take.
“She’s much softer than I imagined,” the Brit filmmaker later tells Teasers of his star, whose character embarks on
a passionate affair with Stefan. “She’s very good at period films, isn’t she? She has a classic old film-star quality.” Not that he sees The Aftermath as a conventional period drama. “It’s just a film set in a period about very modern things,” he says. “I didn’t want the film to feel strongly 1940s. I wanted it to be very naturalistic – not noir, not Bogart.”
One thing’s for sure: The Aftermath should be as emotionally charged as Kent’s first film, 2014 war drama Testament Of Youth, although with a different message. “This film is very much about, how does a marriage survive the death of a child?” Kent reveals of the toll the war has taken on Rachael. “Testament is all about acceptance, and The Aftermath is all about forgiveness.”
ETA | 1 MARCH / THE AfTERMATH opEns THis spRing.