After Love (2020, Aleem Khan) (Patreon)

52/100

Briefly thought this contrived English Channel melodrama might be doing something insanely nervy—arguably career-suicidal for a filmmaker named, say, Bob Jones—but false alarm. I'm something of a sucker for its basic narrative: still-grieving protagonist discovers that his/her freshly interred spouse/partner had been having an affair, becomes self-destructively obsessed with learning the details; most recent first-rate example is A White, White Day, but I even have a soft spot for Sidney Pollack's Random Hearts (which sort of crosses that idea with In the Mood for Love, minus any formal genius or aching decorum; to be a little fair, Wong hadn't yet made his film). There's an additional twist here, though, in that the widow (played with admirable opacity by Joanna Scanlan, previously known to me primarily as career bureaucrat Terri on The Thick of It) is a white Brit who adopted her Pakistani-born husband's faith and culture, while the other woman (Nathalie Richard, gently brittle), who's also mother to the dead man's only child (a teenager!), couldn't possibly be more stereotypically le chic français. Through a mix-up best left unexamined if you want to enjoy this picture, the latter mistakes the former for a new housekeeper she didn't actually quite hire (see what I mean?), and what follows is a banal when-will-the-ugly-truth-emerge? tensionfest, further complicated by the teen son being in the closet (to Mom, at least) and also entirely ignorant of his father's other life, to say nothing of his father's death. (Exactly how did this dude maintain two families in two countries for closing in on two decades, without anyone but himself and his mistress being aware of it? Again, please don't ask too many such questions. You can sorta piece it together, but you'll need to be quite generous.) That I've spent so much time just laying out the scenario, while still omitting significant details, speaks to After Love's fundamental awkwardness...but it all seemed to be potentially coming together, in a productively disturbing way, when Mary/Fahima stands before her late husband's lover's bedroom mirror and starts applying the other woman's makeup, eventually removing the headscarf she always wears outside of her own home and silently gazing at her no-longer-Muslim-looking reflection. That's the only moment, though, suggesting that Mary's discovery may have triggered any retroactive regret about converting, or inner turmoil specifically related to the religious disjunction between what her beloved wanted at home and what he sought elsewhere. Could Khan have made that psychological dynamic non-offensive? No idea, but I'd have been excited to see him try. As is, too many notes, creating a discordant atonality.