After Love | Living apart together proves messy in this moving Belgian drama

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After Love Cédric Kahn Bérénice Bejo

After Love Cédric Kahn Bérénice Bejo

Claustrophobic marital drama.

Moving Belgian drama After Love explores the messy ending of a marriage with claustrophobic rigour and painful honesty. Haute-bourgeois academic Marie (The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo) and handyman Boris (Cédric Kahn) are separating after 15 years together. But until they agree on a financial settlement the unemployed Boris can’t afford to move out of the home they share with their lively eight-year-old twin daughters.

Barely leaving their attractive garden apartment, director Joachim Lafosse’s camera picks up the couple’s growing frustrations and passive-aggressive manoeuvres with beady clarity. Love for Bejo’s Marie has curdled into something approaching hate, yet as her relationship with Boris reaches its awkward final throes, there are fleeting moments of tenderness as well.

Certificate 12A. Runtime 101 mins. Director Joachim Lafosse

After Love (L'économie du couple) debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on Wednesday 2 August. Available on DVD from Curzon Artificial Eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zxQXzSpbM

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Jason Best
Jason Best

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.