BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE
Movie set in magnificent desolation, but as a romance story it’s a bust
Say what you will about the aftermath of the Second World War in Germany, but it looks terribly pretty in this new film from Britain’s James Kent. Even the rubble of bombed-out Hamburg in December 1945 looks appealing, like burnt gingerbread with snowy frosting. Into this magnificent desolation steps Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley), the wife of local British Colonel Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke) — though you could be forgiven for assuming they were mere acquaintances, given the cool civility of their greeting at the train station. Lewis has been in Germany through the war and is now helping to keep order during the peace. He’s the type of soldier who’s always in uniform, even when he isn’t. This doesn’t make for the most romantic home life. The Morgans have requisitioned the grand home of local architect Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), who is expected to move to a displaced persons camp with his teenage daughter. But in a show of victorious magnanimity, Lewis decides to let the two stay on. They will move into the attic, refugees in their own house. Rachael is unreceptive to this arrangement, and tells “Herr Lubert” to confine himself and his daughter to their parts of the house. He agrees, though he insists on calling the areas “zones.” And with only one entrance, they keep bumping into each other at all hours. The director is mostly known for television and documentary work, though his only other feature, 2015’s Testament of Youth, was set during the First World War. That one was based on the real-life memoirs of Vera Brittain, whereas The Aftermath is adapted from a novel by Rhidian Brook. But there are certain similarities, not least the combustible collision of stiff-upper-lippedness and wartime passions. Knightley has managed this balancing act before — see Colette, The Imitation Game, Anna Karenina, Never Let Me Go, The Duchess, Pride & Prejudice and, if you like, Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s almost second nature for her to hint at deeply repressed urges, and composer Martin Phipps helps immensely, at times slipping a percussive racing pulse beneath the piano-heavy score. The film features a certain symmetry, bookended by scenes at a train station. And just as Stephen lost his wife during the firebombing of Hamburg, we find out early on that Rachael and Lewis once had a little boy. But in many ways, it’s all too tidy. An underdeveloped subplot finds Stephen’s daughter flirting with a young man who maintains an allegiance to the defeated Third Reich, and whose story will clearly intersect with the Morgans’ at some point. The romance between Rachael and Stephen, when it emerges, feels similarly forced, narratively convenient rather than organic. One thing The Aftermath does well is to illustrate the simmering tensions that existed in the weeks and months after the war, and the uneasy, often broken peace between former adversaries. Many films are set either during the conflict or on the trailing edge of its long shadow, but few examine the slippery boundary between war and peace. One very good one from a few years back is Land of Mine, a Danish film about former Third Reich soldiers, many of them little more than children, being forced to clear Danish beaches of explosives left by the Germans. The Aftermath is set in the same fraught time period, but its story isn’t nearly as compelling.