A love affair kindled in the ashes of war

On July 27 1943, the Allies bombed the city of Hamburg, killing 40,000 people. This much we learn from one rather clunkily didactic line in director James Kent’s new film The Aftermath. What we’re not told here is that the incendiary bombs from the RAF’S 722 aircraft created a firestorm in which 150mph winds fanned flames to more than 800C, igniting people’s hair, clothes and houses in a flash. (In the grimly memorable words of the historian Antony Beevor, “… Tarmac boiled, and people became glued to it like insects on a flypaper”.) The debate over whether or not the bombing was justified continues still; what no one disputes is the horror it caused.

Such is the backdrop of The Aftermath, co-adapted by Rhidian Brook from his 2013 novel of the same name. Into the ruins of Hamburg, five months after V-E Day, arrives Rachel Morgan (Keira Knightley) – she is at long last to be reunited with her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), a colonel in the British Army. Many German houses were requisitioned by the occupying victors, and the Morgans are “given” the grand, stuccoed, still very much intact seafront home of architect Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), where he still lives with his 15-year-old daughter, Freda (promising youngster Flora Li Thiemann).

Like Brook’s grandfather, the sympathetic Lewis refuses, however, to follow convention and pack the Luberts off to a camp. In fact, as he uncompromisingly instructs Rachel, they are to stay, albeit in the upper, remote reaches of this palatial house

Rachel is aghast. The first time we see her – on the train to Hamburg, with a fellow passenger’s child reading out the British booklet cautioning against fraternisation with Germans – she is as ashen as the town to which she is heading. The Morgans’ 11-yearold son, Michael, was killed during the Blitz, and at first she completely cold-shoulders her new cohabitants. They, for their part, are also in mourning – Stephen’s wife, Freda’s mother, was among the 40,000.

Part of the post-war reconstruction effort, Lewis spends a lot of time out of the house. Rather too much, in fact. You might well expect Rachel to find herself ever less mindful of that pamphlet, and increasingly attracted to the saturnine Stefan – and you’d be right.

This much, then, is unsurprising, and you certainly have to navigate a few clichés as the film sets out its stall, Smitten: Rachel Morgan (Keira Knightley) finds herself drawn to a German widower from birds chirping during flashbacks as Rachel reminisces about Michael to her softening towards Stefan as she peers out at him chopping wood. I wonder, too, if the film’s engaging, nations-unite liberalism ultimately quite knits with its own central narrative, though to say any more on this here would be to give the game away.

But you keep watching. Although Kent (who also made the 2014 Vera Brittain adaptation Testament of Youth) keeps his lens trained chiefly on the fractured love triangle at The

Aftermath’s centre, he and director of photography Franz Lustig – with the help of compelling CGI and the watchful eye of executive producer Ridley Scott – keep reminding you of the devastation against which it is playing out. Central Hamburg here is wasteland as apocalyptic as anything in the Terminator franchise, while the ochre-tinged interior scenes, in the large house haunted by memories of the dead, are also handled with enough aplomb to nudge them above Sundaynight costume-drama territory.

Speaking of costumes, the fashions of the first half of the last century always did hang well on Knightley’s slender frame. She looks and feels very much of the period, also demonstrating plenty of nuance as Rachel shifts from intense grief (and attendant Kristin Scott Thomas-like brittleness) towards renewed warmth. Meanwhile, as her beau-to-be, that fine Swedish actor Skarsgård doesn’t do much more than what’s expected of him, but nevertheless does it with style: there’s plenty of chemistry between the two of them, even if his biceps do turn out to be implausibly large.

Perhaps the most stirring scenes, however, are Clarke’s. Would the British officer class of ’45 have had quite as much warmth in their vowels? Probably not. But if you didn’t know that Clarke is Australian, I doubt you’d guess it from this film. The Everest star really puts his back in to this performance, and the portrait of paternal mourning that emerges had this old softie’s bottom lip very much a-quiver.

Disappointingly, there is little or no discussion of the morality of the Hamburg bombing (the scenes involving Martin Compston’s cheerfully nasty British officer barely scratch the surface), and the subplot involving Freda and a vengeful young Nazi is dealt with so cursorily that it feels tacked on only to add a thrillerlike sense of a ticking clock.

Forgive its many peccadilloes, however, and you may well enjoy this love story: for its performances, its strong sense of time and place, and its vivid reminder that a war’s official end is never really anything of the kind.