No sooner had one of my trusted and beloved website managers informed me that in a recent week the number of visits to The MacMahonian had increased by some 50% to a staggering 135, 77 of which newcomers, than a rush of anguish and self-doubt invaded me: whatever next? Fame and riches? Now, lots of things can make one famous but only money can make one rich. Luckily, I'm cut for neither. So it's not for nothing this website is anonymous, ere I walk the streets purple with embarrassment for all the typos, non sequiturs and sloppy puns that punctuate The MacMahonian's history. I could, of course, go back and correct them but I won't. As with scars and warts, they're to be worn as matter of course. Mandatory digression dispensed with, on to today's entry: The Aftermath.
The Aftermath is the 1st feature film directed by James Kent, an illustrious unknown who doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia entry but who according to IMDb has a 30 year career as TV director.
The Aftermath tells the story of Rachael (Keira Knightley, flat) and Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke, excellent) a couple reunited in post-WWII Hamburg, where Jason is serving as a British Army officer. They lost a child during the London bombings of 1943, something Racheal can't live with and Lewis can't face, resulting in Rachael committing the utmost abomination of having an affair with a German, Stefan Lubert, an architect whose luxurious mansion the occupying forces had “requisitioned” for the accommodation of the Morgans, it all ending (spoiler alert) sort of well as Rachael “comes to her senses” and decides to do the “right thing” by returning to her legitimate consort.
Wars are horrible business so it's seldom pointed out that they too can have positive externalities, one being, in the case of WWII, an evolution in the dramatic portrayal of adultery and divorce as no longer unspeakable stigmata but as problems almost everybody faces sooner or later, David Lean's 1946 Brief Encounter being the cinematic historical landmark of this development. The Aftermath is also set in 1946 and, except for a few “graphic” lovemaking and fighting scenes, could have been directed in that very same year, a sort of seven-decade belated prequel to The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), a bourgeois morality play with fair-to middling to wooden performances, honourably excepting Clarke and Skarsgård, and functional directing with the occasional mandatory redundantly decorative cinematography, although it does feature the refreshing relative originality of portraying sympathetically the plight the German population under heavy-handed occupation.
Worthy, if unworthy of the plot [I recommend Kent watch Luis Buñuel's Susana (1951) and Él (1953) for examples of melodramatic fire and fury] make for a sedate film. But literally millions such stories, and much worse ones, took place during and after WWII, most not being dwelled upon, let alone filmed, because of other pressing matters. The Aftermath's main, perhaps only, merit is reminding us of this.