P.76 “The Aftermath” review
Less widely seen (and acclaimed) than it deserved to be, James Kent’s debut feature, “Testament of Youth,” was one of the great recent love-in-wartime dramas. Four years on, it’s not hard to see why Kent was enlisted for “The Aftermath,” which aims for a similar oldschool blend of stiff-upper-lip heartbreak and grand classical sweep amid the ruins of another world war.
Paring Rhidian Brook’s 2013 best-seller down to a straightforward love triangle between Keira Knightley and Jason Clarke’s troubled English married couple and the dreamy German widower (Alexander Skarsgård) whose house they’ve requisitioned in post-world War II Hamburg, Kent’s film settles efficiently but less enthrallingly into the territory of a rainy-afternoon soap.
The result is attractive and diverting, as any well-appointed film starring these actors in mouthwatering period finery could hardly fail to be. With Knightley dependably anchoring proceedings, this Fox Searchlight release, shot in early 2017, will please a select audience starved for grown-up comfort-viewing when it hits screens on both sides of the Atlantic in March.
In the British- controlled region of Hamburg, as numerous Brit officers and their families repossess German houses for the duration of the rebuilding effort, Capt. Lewis Morgan (Clarke) proposes a fair but unorthodox compromise when his wife, Rachael (Knightley), arrives from England to join him: Rather than evicting anguished architect Stefan Lubert (Skarsgård) and his daughter, Freda (Flora Li Thiemann), from their own home, the four will share the roomy premises in a literal upstairs- downstairs arrangement.
The families have more in common than their lodgings. Stefan and Freda are still numbed by the loss of their wife and mother in the Hamburg bombings; the Morgans’ marriage, meanwhile, has been politely on ice since their only son was killed in a blast in Blighty some years before. Shared grief does little to warm the prickly, vehemently Germanophobic Rachael to her new housemates at first. Yet given the frequent absences of her semi- estranged husband, how long can she resist the charms of a sensitive slab of Skarsgård in her immediate vicinity?
Writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse have also pitched in on Brook’s adaptation, and in the process, the human stakes and dynamics of this romantic tangle have been somewhat streamlined. Gone are a number of secondary characters and tensions (including the Morgans’ second, living, son) to allow more room for Knightley and Skarsgård’s gradual, sensual thawing — culminating in a tactile sex scene, shot in white cascades of afternoon light by DP Franz Lustig, which is pretty luxuriant hot stuff by the standards of this tightly upholstered genre.
As tends to be the case in the chilliest corner of any love triangle, Clarke has the most to work with, and his portrayal of clammed-up trauma masquerading as the very model of a modern major general yields the film’s most hard- earned scenes of emotional catharsis. Kent handles his actors with the care and sympathy they deserve: He’s a romantic and a classicist in a manner that has now fallen rather out of fashion but makes him ideal for war films that largely play out on the battlefield of a beautiful human face.