Calling to mind Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, lushly coloured in, this stodgy drama is elevated by the presence of Australian actor Clarke, who commands attention a as the weary British Colonel weighed down by years of incessant tragedy. Keira Knightley brings whispers of Atonement as she wafts disconsolately around a large mansion, peering through the window at a comely German widower played by Alexander Skarsgård. Opening in the UK on March 1 to be followed two weeks later in the US via Fox Searchlight, this BBC Films-backed production will undoubtedly be marketed as tasteful prestige fare, adapted from the novel by Rhidian Brook and shot entirely on location in Germany and the Czech Republic. The Aftermath works best when looking at the bewildered people who have been left behind, literally, to pick up the pieces All three characters are grappling with the past in a city destroyed by it. The Aftermath features Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgård, and Jason Clarke in a romantic triangle in which Clarke, surprisingly, shines by far the brightest. 109minsĪs The Favourite limbers up for the Academy Awards, director James Kent ( Testament Of Youth) brings British-made period drama back to basics with a solid and – perhaps appropriately – gloomy post-war love story set in a ravaged Hamburg of 1945. It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.Dir. But there is no real commitment to this idea in the drama. As Stefan says, it is “Stunde Null, Year Zero, everything can start again”. She is almost a darker version of the chatty, insensitive Dolly Messiter in Brief Encounter (1946).Īs a love story, the film is supposed to derive a kind of energy from the devastation itself, a sense that with everything flattened, things can be reimagined. Mrs Burnham loves to gossip, though with an edge of shrewdness and spite. Rachel is in the habit of taking tea with an expat acquaintance in Hamburg, Susan Burnham ( Kate Phillips), the wife of a boorish intelligence officer, played by Martin Compston. Freda meets up with Albert ( Jannik Schümann), a menacing young man from the town, and it is eerily like Liesl, the 16-going-on-17-year-old widower’s daughter in The Sound of Music, having her covert assignations with telegram boy Rolf, with his sinister loyalties. It is reminiscent of Suite Française – though not quite as glib as that other prestigious period production about postwar love and guilt, The Reader.Īnd other parts of the film seem borrowed, too. But, even if it did look plausible, there is something too easy in the way the horrors and guilt of the second world war are slathered in this tragi-romantic syrup. The pair’s first kiss is lacking in the despairing passion that it is supposed to radiate. The emotional flashpoints of this secret love are frankly forced and unconvincing. And these lonely souls are drawn together. And so, with an awful inevitability, Lewis is away all day neglecting his wife’s emotional needs, and leaving her to brood over the beautiful Steinway in the house. In theory, Stefan and Freda should be packed off to a camp, but Lewis has the grace to be embarrassed about this, and allows Stefan and Freda to live in the attic, with Stefan permitted to do humble work in the garden. The Morgans have the right to requisition un-bombed German houses as their living quarters and they are assigned the beautiful home of Stefan Lubert (Skarsgård), sensitive architect, widower and non-party-member and his difficult teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann).
With him, Lewis has brought his beautiful, emotionally brittle wife Rachel (Knightley) who is trying her best to confront the secret pain in their marriage, about which Lewis is in denial. He is there to administer the postwar settlement, to keep order among the fractious civilian population – traumatised by the devastating British bombing – and to supervise the “denazification” process, the purpose of which is to root out unrepentant Hitlerites.
The year is 1946 and Colonel Lewis Morgan (Clarke) is part of the British military posting in Hamburg, a decent man but emotionally cold.
0 kommentar(er)
