"Love After Love" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL April 13, 1996 There was nothing much in the theaters around Tampa this week that inspired me from a women and film perspective, so I made one of my relatively rare forays to a video store to see what I might find of interest. At Frank Granda's Unique Video (at Armenia and Waters) I found "Love After Love" (or just "After Love": "Apres L'amour" in French), the newest American release of a film by one of my favorite filmmakers, Diane Kurys. Diane Kurys' films tend to be explorations of relationships among people who are never cardboard cutout stereotypes; always multi dimensional, complex, a bit inconsistent (as people are, after all), subtle and fascinating. She has a way of letting her stories unroll without high peaks and valleys of dramatic action, taking time to let us see her characters in all sorts of everyday situations. There is closure to her films, but it's never hermetically sealed; we always have the sense of having seen just a segment of the lives of her characters but a strong sense that the lives are continuing into the future (and I'm often curious about how things will work out for them). Another thing I love about Kurys' films is that I'm invariably thinking about them long after I have left the theater or rewound the tape, trying to figure out not "the meaning" but what I can learn from these people on the screen and what Kurys knows that these people reveal. I see "Love After Love" as a meditation on various women's lives (and men's too though their experience is different of course) in a time and milieu in which fidelity to a single partner is, for all extents and purposes, non existent and the way having or not having children inflects these experiences. The film focuses on Lola (played by the perfect Kurys actor Isabelle Hupert) a woman in her late thirties or early forties who is a successful writer and who lives in Paris with her long time lover, David (whom she's known since she was fifteen), a busy architect. As the film opens Lola is engaged in a passionate affair with a rock musician and cuts out of the big birthday party David is throwing for her to make love in a car with the aforementioned musician. David is, understandably, hurt and angry. He, however, has his own outside interests, to say the least. While he has been living for years with Lola, who does not want children, he has also had two children with Marianne. The children live with their mother, but David is quite an actively involved father and ongoing lover of their mother, too. Meanwhile, Tom, the musician, is also the involved father of two children and finds it hard to comprehend Lola when she says she has never wanted children. Rounding out the cast of characters are Tom's wife, who knows of his extra marital relationships but is very confident she is in the power position as the mother of his children; David's brother Romain and his fiancee Ann, and Rachel, a young woman who works with David and Romain in their architectural firm and is sexually interested in each of them at one point or another during the yearlong period the plot covers. In this kind of situation the men are busy, with their work, their children and their various relationships. The women react variously with Marianne, who has invested herself entirely in David and their two boys, suffering the most and being the most destructive and manipulative in her efforts to win him for herself alone. Lola, who has her own work and life apart from David and Tom, fares the best, though she, too, has her ups and downs and frustrations with these men who have so many other claims on their being. By the time the film ends a year has rolled around and David is giving Lola another birthday party, the kaleidescope has turned a fraction of an inch, the elements are in a different relationship to each other, things have changed, people have moved on. Some have gotten closer, some farther apart and new lements are about to be added to the mix. of This film won't be everyone's kind of film, but if you are a patient film goer and like to see this kind of intelligent and sensitive exploration of contemporary lives, you couldn't do better than this. It's called Love After Love and is available in video. For "The Women's Show" this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduc this review without the consemt of the author, who may be reached at mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.