After Love
AFTER LOVE, drama, not rated, in French with subtitles, The Screen, 2.5 chiles
If hell turns out to be a nicely furnished, bright little garden apartment where love has grown cold, Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s movie will give you some idea of what to look forward to. It’s not that it’s not well done; it’s more a question of whether this is a place where you want to spend your time.
Marie (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist) and Boris (actor/director Cédric Kahn) have reached the end of a 15-year marriage that was once passionate, but is now a battleground with icy moments of truce punctuating sustained sniper fire. They are continuing to live together for the time being for reasons that are clear in the original French title, L’Economie du couple: They can’t afford separate housing until they work out a financial settlement. And as long as they’re forced to coexist in these close quarters, so are we — almost the entire movie remains confined to the apartment and yard.
Sharing the space are their adorable, if somewhat spoiled, little twins Jade and Margaux ( Jade and Margaux Soentjens), in front of whom Marie and Boris squabble and shout. We don’t really know the specifics of what drove the knife into the heart of this relationship, but we get clues: Boris is not strictly a man who honors promises, Marie can be petty and vindictive, and neither is above using the girls to get at the other. But the issue of all issues is money.
Marie comes from money. Her parents put up the purchase price of the apartment. Boris was a kid from the skinny side of the tracks, and he’s never been able to generate much of a career. He describes himself as an architect, but he seems more like an out-of-work contractor. The sticking point of their breakup is his insistence on getting half the value of the apartment, which he has extensively remodeled and improved.
The other major stumbling block to this split is that only Marie wants it. Boris tries to take advantage of their continued cohabitation to insinuate himself back into her affections, but she’s not having any. Even the wellintentioned advice of her reconciliation-minded mother (a most welcome Marthe Keller) falls on irritated ears.
Despite a flicker or two of remembered warmth, this is not a marriage that merits saving. Boris has charm, but he can be a real passive-aggressive jerk. Marie is a hermetically sealed container of resentment. Both actors do a fine job of painting the humanity of their characters, and there’s no denying the accomplishment of Lafosse and his collaborators (a coscreenwriter is Mazarine Pingeot, the love child of former President Mitterrand and his mistress) in creating this claustrophobic little hell.
But as the sign above the door of that establishment reads, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” — Jonathan Richards