Moving FoRward
AFTER LOVE | A Muslim convert mourns her husband in a powerful, grief-stricken drama.
In the six years Aleem Khan spent writing After Love, he can’t have imagined the world it would be released into. It was due to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival before Covid threw it into disarray, and its release now comes at the end of one of the most devastating years in living memory. After Love, though not about a global crisis, deals with grief and devastation that speaks directly to our current collective heartbreak.
“Grief is now just like the order of the day, culturally, socially and individually, isn’t it?” star Joanna Scanlan shares with Teasers. “So yeah, it’s strangely timely.”
After Love is the story of Mary, an English Muslim convert living in Dover, whose husband Ahmed dies suddenly in the film’s opening scene. Crushed by this loss, Mary is devastated further when she discovers he had a secret life across the Channel in Calais.
The material is deeply personal for Khan. “My parents met when they were teenagers, my mum converted when she married my dad and is a practising Muslim.” The casting of Scanlan was crucial to telling such a personal story with the sensitivity and gravitas the role required. “What Joanna has is a real vulnerability,” Khan says, “especially in her eyes. That really reminded me of my mum.”
Scanlan takes on the role with complexity, depth and a commitment to elevating Mary beyond a stereotype. Much of the film sees her alone going through huge emotional arcs and projecting decades of identity crumbling within her. “I come from a religious Catholic family,” she explains. “I could find parallels and connections between living life within faith, and I did a lot of research with Aleem. I talked with his family members, I did a lot of reading. I also did a bit of going to mosques, just observing, which I found very peaceful and relaxing, a kind of sanctuary.”
While Scanlan shines in the bigger collapses of emotion, she is even more powerful in some of the smaller moments, like when she takes particular care folding her late husband’s shirts. “When we lose people we love,” Khan explains, “they transpose a charge into things they leave. Their clothes, their records, their children… the essence of them can continue in another form.”
As well as telling a personal story filled with twists and turns, After Love taps into the power that cinema can have in helping us deal with a shared tragedy. Or as Khan puts it, “To have the audience walk alongside the characters, deal with the deeper complexities of grief and deceit, it’s so layered and it doesn’t follow a linear trajectory.” LL
ETA | 4 JUNE / AFTER LOVE OPENS IN CINEMAS THIS SUMMER.