After Love(Available On Mubi)
Starring Joanna Scanlan, Nathalie Richard, Talid Ariss
Written & Directed by Aleem Khan
Rating: ****
Not many have seen Aleem Khan’s 2020 film After Love. If the truth be told no genuine cineaste should miss this moving exploration of bereavement, grief and acceptance told in a style that is at once unique and familiar.While providing the comfort of the familiar by putting his characters in situations that are at once real and dramatic, Khan floats into an excruciating excursion into fantasy-fiction that is not only hard to pin down , but near-impossible to achieve for any director except the one who isn’t afraid to venture into the unknown with the familiar known tools of cinematic expression.
I was gripped and crushed from Frame 1. The film opens with a 60-plus couple entering their cosy well-appointed functional home in Dover after an evening walk. From their demeanour it is apparent that this is a routine the couple has followed for years. He heads for the living room where he switches on a Hindi song. The sound of Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh singing Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayaal aata hai wafts into the kitchen where the wife –she is Mary Hussain, a Britisher converted to Islam after marriage to her Pakistani husband—makes tea.
Mary heads to the livingroom with the tray, conversing comfortably with her husband. He doesn’t answer.Ahmed, her husband,is dead.
But wait. This is not just a film about sudden unforeseen bereavement. As Mary’s world comes crumbling down she discovers that her husband had another life in another town with another woman in Calais, France.
Secrets are revealed not to shock but as a resigned sigh at life’s unexpected blows that are rained on the individual when she is least prepared for them. Rather than wallow in just the tragedy of bereavement Aleem Khan’s screenplay is constantly on the prowl, ferreting out dimensions to the conundrum of marriage , commitment, cultural fragmentation and emotional conflict ,with an unnerving calmness.
Set in the small soporific British seaside town of Dover, the splashing waves serve as a melancholic metaphor for Mary’s inexpressible grief (she listens to her husband’s voicemail messages to calm her surging grief) as she travels to France to meet her husband’s other life, other family.
What happens next between the two women, the soutans(there is no word for it in English) in the deceased Ahmed’s life, is not just profoundly moving but also constantly surprising.Ahmed’s French mistress Genevieve(Nathalie Richard, no coincidence that she is reed-thin) has a 14-year old son Solomon(Talid Ariss) who is ridden with problems of a missing father and his burgeoning sexuality.A beautiful bond of empathy grows between Mary and her soutan’s son.
None of this seems forced into the narrative. The emotional conflict is so fluent and vivid , it seems like a typical South Indian masala-dosa film about two warring women sharing the same man(ref: Maang Bharo Sajna, Raaste Pyar Ke, Nazrana) played out as a Greek tragedy
Standing tall and supremely dignified at the centre of this muted masterpiece is the little-known British actress Joanna Scanlan in her first major role. Overweight and overwrought with emotions Ms Scanlan’s portrayal of Mary Hussain’s grief is devastating in its dignity. Her eyes reflect a pain that only the camera can explain. Joanna Scanlan, as a woman torn between her dead husband’s Islamic faith and the uncertain future bequeathed to her by his unscheduled death, holds this delicately constructed drama together.
Like Mary Hussain suddenly left bereft, I wonder what this film would be like without Joanna Scanlan.
