In After Love, Mary Hussain (Joanna Scanlan), who converted to Islam when she married and is now in her early 60s, lives quietly with her husband Ahmed. Following his unexpected death, she suddenly finds herself a widow. A day after the burial, she discovers that Ahmed had a secret life just 21 miles away from their Dover home, across the Channel in Calais. The shocking discovery compels her to go there to find out more, and as she grapples with her shattered sense of identity, her search for understanding has surprising consequences.
Identity
-As British- Pakistani director Aleem Khan’s debut feature, after love depicted a very unusual heroine -- a white Muslim, Mary, who suffered her husband’s sudden demise after a forty-years marriage.
In Stephen Frears’ my beautiful launderette, and Gurinder Chadha’s blinded by the light, we have experienced the dilemma and obstacles the Pakistan immigrants faced in the process of integrating the western culture and community. But this time, Aleem Khan decided to tell the story from the opposite perspective. From the very first scenes of the funeral, we can perceive the discrepancy between Mary and the other Muslim women in terms of how they react to the death of Ahmed, her husband and how familiar they are of Islam traditions.
The centric heroine was accepted by the bunch of Muslims but also isolated. We can see that Mary sits there in white robe surrounded by a bunch of Pakistan women in black robes. She is crying in silence, but the others are sobbing loudly. The director attempted to create a structure in which the protagonist avoided to involve herself in crowd. She speaks Urdu, she behaves as an Islamic woman, but she is white. In this way, the key factor which distinguished Mary from other people is not religion, language, or cultural habits but the emotional behaviors.
As an Islamic woman, she must conventionalize to her husband and totally trust him, but as a British woman, she felt broken after that she found out the betrayal of her husband in the past decade.
This question leads to another issue about modernity.
Post- Modernity:
In the whole British cinema history, have we never spectated a character like Mary, who never suspected her husband having an affair and never hesitated herself her Muslim religion, but in the end, the cliff rock cracked just like her internal world.
Ahmed’s departure reveals so many issues that Mary has never been occurred to. She starts to reflect herself as a wife, and a former mother whose baby died by illness.
Apparently, housewives always struggle with the truth of that their husbands tried to cheat on them. Modern communication devices facilitated us to maintain a connection more easily but at the same time make it harder to face the most obvious truth.
We prefer to establish a stable connection by our affections with other individuals, but we choose not to take the block down just like Solomon’s mother, Genevie did.
In France, Genevie is a mother of a son, she is an independent woman who supports herself to buy a house. But on the other hand, she is the third person of a steady marriage.
Solomon, who is France and Pakistani at the same time he is a sixteen-year-old teenager and is gay.
Everyone in this social structure is leading a double life by themselves. In other words, they choose to hide themselves because they don’t want to break the rules that they set for themselves.
Social Realism:
Above all the British cinema history, it is very difficult to clarify which genre this feature belongs to. There are not so much suffocating moments or the struggling proceeds in term of religion, sexual orientation, ethic in any of these scenes. In after love, the director only attempted to emphasize the internal mind of a woman after trauma both physically and spiritually and how she dealt with her past which she seemed to be similar but not have any acquaintance at all. When her belief turned out to be nothing than her willingness, how she maintains her religion. It is about How she coincides herself to her former husband’s undeniable secret and the unchangeable truth as human being.
总有一些话 来不及说了 总有一个人 是心口的朱砂
想起那些话 那些傻 眼泪落下 只留一句 你现在好吗
如果爱忘了 泪不想落下 那些幸福啊 让她替我到达
如果爱懂了 承诺的代价 不能给我的 请完整给她
如果爱忘了 泪不想落下那些幸福啊 让她替我到达
如果爱懂了 承诺的代价不能给我的 请完整给她。
In After Love, Mary Hussain (Joanna Scanlan), who converted to Islam when she married and is now in her early 60s, lives quietly with her husband Ahmed. Following his unexpected death, she suddenly finds herself a widow. A day after the burial, she discovers that Ahmed had a secret life just 21 miles away from their Dover home, across the Channel in Calais. The shocking discovery compels her to go there to find out more, and as she grapples with her shattered sense of identity, her search for understanding has surprising consequences.
Identity
-As British- Pakistani director Aleem Khan’s debut feature, after love depicted a very unusual heroine -- a white Muslim, Mary, who suffered her husband’s sudden demise after a forty-years marriage.
In Stephen Frears’ my beautiful launderette, and Gurinder Chadha’s blinded by the light, we have experienced the dilemma and obstacles the Pakistan immigrants faced in the process of integrating the western culture and community. But this time, Aleem Khan decided to tell the story from the opposite perspective. From the very first scenes of the funeral, we can perceive the discrepancy between Mary and the other Muslim women in terms of how they react to the death of Ahmed, her husband and how familiar they are of Islam traditions.
The centric heroine was accepted by the bunch of Muslims but also isolated. We can see that Mary sits there in white robe surrounded by a bunch of Pakistan women in black robes. She is crying in silence, but the others are sobbing loudly. The director attempted to create a structure in which the protagonist avoided to involve herself in crowd. She speaks Urdu, she behaves as an Islamic woman, but she is white. In this way, the key factor which distinguished Mary from other people is not religion, language, or cultural habits but the emotional behaviors.
As an Islamic woman, she must conventionalize to her husband and totally trust him, but as a British woman, she felt broken after that she found out the betrayal of her husband in the past decade.
This question leads to another issue about modernity.
Post- Modernity:
In the whole British cinema history, have we never spectated a character like Mary, who never suspected her husband having an affair and never hesitated herself her Muslim religion, but in the end, the cliff rock cracked just like her internal world.
Ahmed’s departure reveals so many issues that Mary has never been occurred to. She starts to reflect herself as a wife, and a former mother whose baby died by illness.
Apparently, housewives always struggle with the truth of that their husbands tried to cheat on them. Modern communication devices facilitated us to maintain a connection more easily but at the same time make it harder to face the most obvious truth.
We prefer to establish a stable connection by our affections with other individuals, but we choose not to take the block down just like Solomon’s mother, Genevie did.
In France, Genevie is a mother of a son, she is an independent woman who supports herself to buy a house. But on the other hand, she is the third person of a steady marriage.
Solomon, who is France and Pakistani at the same time he is a sixteen-year-old teenager and is gay.
Everyone in this social structure is leading a double life by themselves. In other words, they choose to hide themselves because they don’t want to break the rules that they set for themselves.
Social Realism:
Above all the British cinema history, it is very difficult to clarify which genre this feature belongs to. There are not so much suffocating moments or the struggling proceeds in term of religion, sexual orientation, ethic in any of these scenes. In after love, the director only attempted to emphasize the internal mind of a woman after trauma both physically and spiritually and how she dealt with her past which she seemed to be similar but not have any acquaintance at all. When her belief turned out to be nothing than her willingness, how she maintains her religion. It is about How she coincides herself to her former husband’s undeniable secret and the unchangeable truth as human being.
After love / 爱的后事
不是在讲故事，而是呈现一种处境，一种立场 ，以及无数复杂的关系和情感。
两位女主身上各自有着一半的丈夫的影子，所以她们都在对方身上看到了丈夫的另一半，还有另一半是想象中的丈夫会喜欢的样子，也可以看作是她们想象中的自我。也因此，儿子会愿意亲近Mary而非生母。（当然，儿子担心被母亲发现自己的性取向，而且他生活中的困难似乎都和母亲有关，因此他反而不愿意亲近母亲，而Mary对他来说更像是一个看起来像父亲的陌生人，他也想从Mary身上看到父亲的另一面。）
一个男人死了，与他直接相关的三个亲人都保留着他的某一面，就像房顶的灰尘，悬崖边塌陷的土石，存留人间。
对Mary来说，恐怕最难过的事情是明知对方在外另有情人孩子，自己也仍然深爱着他。她一遍遍听着丈夫留给她的最后一条温情的留言，像是在反复自证爱的存在爱的真实。而过去，他们之间的爱呢？那长达四十年的爱呢？Mary再次从录音带中听到丈夫的声音，那份爱也依然那么真切。所以，她也会自我怀疑，也会自我否定认为是自己的问题导致丈夫出轨，唉···
可是啊，Mary，你为他付出那么多那么多，我几乎看不到你自己了。曾经的你到底是个怎么样的英国女孩呢？在没嫁给他之前···
结尾那一幕，那巨大的白色崖壁，隔着海水，不知道为什么给我一种出埃及记的感觉。离开埃及，经过旷野，渡过红海，到达应许之地···
关于演员Joanna Scanlan。因为Joanna才看的这部电影，她在其中的表演是那么润物无声但蕴含着巨大的力量，如果悲伤痛苦也是可以化作力量的话。她完全就是这个突然失去了结婚四十年的丈夫，孤独寂寞的中老年女人Mary。她诠释悲伤，痛苦，惊讶，绝望，无措，困惑，犹疑，麻木，自我审视，自我厌弃，彻底崩溃等等情绪，她在电影中少有情绪起伏特别大的部分，但却精准呈现了每一种情绪，远比我从屏幕上看到的更多。
丈夫的突然离世，起初好像并没有让Mary非常悲伤痛苦，她甚至是略带平静的。可她未来的生活和曾经的生活却在那一刻开始坍塌，就像房顶的裂缝和塌陷的白色崖壁。无数的痛苦困惑悲伤已然在她体内翻涌，让她不断下坠，直到她再也支撑不住，她坐在了海里，又躺下，任由海水稀释那些痛苦泪水，也让海水托举她，给她力量。
伟大的演员无需多言，希望Joanna有更多好剧本好机会，呈现更多好角色。
另外关于结尾我只想说，两位妈妈和儿子，你们三个把日子过好比什么都重要（
《爱的后事》是一部有着奇怪价值观的电影，很容易被它“女性主义”的表象所迷惑。我们不解的是，为何到最后妻子与情人两相和解了？留下一堆烂摊子（未亡人、情人与私生子）明明是那个死去的男人，而最终他却以好丈夫和好父亲的形象盖棺定论，并且促成了妻子与情人间的“旷世”奇缘。
我们只能认为这是从男性导演视角出发的一厢情愿。导演只能看见一个完满的结局，于是将情节往这个方向助推，他始终无法认识到分享爱情这类事情几乎不会在女性身上能发生。在妻子与情人之间，迂回着带有距离的礼节，而没有发展成剧烈冲突。导演似乎有意回避出轨在道德上的恶劣。
结局是不可接受的，这不是童话故事，而是残酷的现实。两个女人在感情中都受到欺骗，承受着铭心的伤痛，那位肇事者却安然地躺在坟墓里，享受着来自尘世的怀恋。应该挖出来“鞭尸”的不正是这个丈夫吗？既然他曾与妻子如此相爱，为何又会出轨呢？他又是如何巧妙地回旋在两个家庭之间，而不被人发现……这些极为重要的信息都被回避了，剩下两位女性自我感动。
男性虽然缺席了，但女性的动作与心理依然围绕着他展开。这提供了对现实的部分阐释，但没能更加深入进去。事实上，导演打着“女性主义”的幌子，做的是男性中心主义的实事。我们不该被这类不真诚的电影感动：它巧编名目，让观众陷于共情的幻觉之中。
男人都爱做这样的梦吧，所有的人都爱他，不仅两个女人爱他，甚至从未尽过父亲责任的儿子也爱他，在他死后所有的人都想保存他的声音和味道。谁给男人的自信？
一个终生深爱自已的妻子，一个明知自己有妻子却甘心只拥有一半的自己并为自己生儿育女还如此独立的情人。两边在他生前各自安好，在他死后知道真相后却能像一家人一样相亲相爱，真是可笑！