Joanna Scanlan in the strongest role

“After Love” .. Best cinematic treatment for the drama Ending a Marriage

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After Love, After Love, or After Life or After Death, there are three titles suitable for this film. It is the first directing experience of Aleem Khan (British of Pakistani origin) in which he asks a question: “What do we know about each other?”

Not what does a brother know about his brother or about a friend, but what does a woman know about her husband after a successful and stable marital relationship?

As if Khan looked at the issue upside down, instead of the film being about an epic that ends with the victory of love, the topic begins with the end of love and the beginning of the discovery of secrets.

Joanna Scanlan in her strongest role to date, embodies Mary, an English woman who converted to Islam after marrying Ahmed (British of Iranian descent Nasir Mimarazia).

They live in Dover, and are captain of a ship that sails the English Channel between Dover and Calais, France.

Mary is satisfied and happy with her marriage and eager to perform her prayers and lives the simplicity of her husband.

The movie begins with a still wide shot from the kitchen of the house where we see Miri in Punjabi dress making tea for her off-camera husband in the living room.

Ahmed plays a song and sits on a chair for a relaxing session after which he never gets up.

After the funeral and mourning ceremonies, Merry searches Ahmed's wallet and finds an ID card of a blonde French woman named Junviève (Natalie Richard) with her Calais address on the card.

What does a blonde woman's ID card do in my husband's wallet?

We see the question clearly in Miri's eye without uttering the word (Imagine if this was an insignificant Arab series or movie (5 or 10 minutes) with monologues and crying)!

Merry decides to take a trip across the canal to ascertain who the identity is and perhaps to confront her.

When Merry arrives at the address of Junviève and meets her, the latter thinks that the former, with her veil, is a cleaner from the poor in Eastern Europe.

Merry decides to go along with Gonviève and take on the role of the cleaner, so that she can explore this woman's life.

The viewer is not surprised by Meri's decision to assume the role, because if you tell her directly, Gonviev will fire her and will not even agree to talk to her.

It should be noted here that Scanlan employs a fully suggestive representation based on her facial expressions in scenes filled with silence or the voice of Junviève.

Mary becomes an indispensable cleaner and household helper, to the point that she is now part of the Gonviève family, who lives with her teenage son.

“After Love” is a painful film, despite some comical moments. Meri is in pain as she learns more details about the lives of Gonviev and Ahmed, which have taken a secret nature and resulted in the birth of this teenager Solomon or Suleiman (Talide Aris), who hates his mother and wants to move to live with his father at all costs.

There is a scene in which Junviev tells Merry that Ahmed told her that his wife is Pakistani.

Meri gets agitated and talks about Ahmed as if she knows him a few words before she remembers that she is disguised as a cleaner.

Meri is the element of suspense in the film, the time bomb that the viewer is waiting to explode, the treasure trove of secrets that came to Calais to plunge into the sea of ​​lies, or the secret life that Ahmed lived without suspecting him.

The Ahmed you know and the one you don't know is dead, and Mary is dead, and this is another Mary that even Merry herself does not know.

Meri feels humiliated at every moment she discovers new information about Ahmed's secret life.

There is a scene of the film's heroine looking at herself in a mirror and examining her flabby body.

There are two meanings of the scene and perhaps more: The first meaning Who am I?

The second: did Ahmed start a relationship with Gonviev because of my flabby body?

There is a scene in which Merry discovers a secret in the house of Gonviev that belongs to her teenage son and keeps it for herself, although the owner of the secret knows that she has revealed it.

Khan employs the language of symbols in the film. When Mary Dover leaves, she sees a cliff collapsing in front of her, which symbolizes her life, her values, or her trust in Ahmed, and she retreats back and of course no one else looks at the scene, which means that this is only happening in her head.

The cliff shot is as wide as the opening shot in a narrow space, in which Ahmed and Miri are very far from each other, and the ending scene is chosen by Khan very wide, and has expanded to the point where the characters disappear from it.

The wide shots reflect pain, gloom, loneliness and isolation.

There is nothing new in this matter.

A woman discovers a relationship to her husband after his death, a story that takes place at any time and place, and Arab dramas in particular have rungs and tours when it comes to these stories.

So why did this movie make us talk about it like it's discovering this kind of story for the first time?

Because the Arab drama makers' treatment of this subject is miserable and poor, all crying, squawking, trivial monologues, characters talking to themselves, and a wife who faints as soon as she learns the truth.

Silly scenes fill Ramadan series every year.

On the other hand, all that Khan did was to employ the feelings of his heroine to replace the shriek of the Arabs, and to use certain clips expressing the questions in the heroine's mind and mirroring her story in the story of the teenager Solomon who keeps a secret.

The result is a very expressive movie that will be immortalized in the memory, and not trivial forgotten series that do not respect the intelligence of the audience.

Khan did not invent anything new, all he did was make a film telling a story that is known and repeated in all societies.

This is the difference between someone who uses the right tools to tell a story and someone who doesn't know how to make a series or even a work that is watchable despite the possibilities.

• Khan did not invent anything new, all he did was make a film that tells a well-known and repeated story.

• The ending scene was chosen by Khan very wide, and began to expand it to the point where the characters disappeared from it.

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