Aleem Khan (2020)

A devoted wife, recently widowed, discovers that her late husband had a secret life with another woman.  Writer-director Aleem Khan’s After Love, which screened at the London Film Festival, revitalises this familiar storyline – through cultural specificity and a superb performance from the versatile, fearless Joanna Scanlan.

In the opening sequence, Fahima Hussain (Scanlan) and her British-Pakistani husband Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia) return to their Dover home after attending the aqiqah ­of a friend’s new grandchild.  (The aqiqah ceremony – a kind of post-natal baby shower – welcomes a Muslim newborn into the world.)  Fahima chats easily with Ahmed as she puts food in the fridge and makes tea.  Her husband goes into the living room and puts on music.  Unlike his wife’s face, Ahmed’s, even in the kitchen, is in shadow and hard to make out.  Once he sits in a chair in the living room, in the background of the frame, only his legs are visible.  Khan barely moves the camera throughout all this.  Although nothing apparently remarkable is happening, the unchanging shot pulls the viewer in, and thereby increases the impact of the scene’s climax.  When Fahima moves to the living room she finds Ahmed dead in his armchair.  The absorbing domestic normality is extinguished, silently and absolutely.

Khan is succinct in situating Fahima in the subsequent ritual of mourning.  A large figure in white robes, she’s physically at its centre, flanked by dark-clothed women from Ahmed’s family.  Unlike them, she’s quiet and almost dry-eyed in expressing her grief.  After the funeral, Fahima sorts through her husband’s things.  She’s puzzled to find in his wallet the identity card of a French woman called Geneviève.  Fahima looks at the messages on Ahmed’s phone, and discovers texts exchanged with a woman of the same name.  Khan next shows Fahima on board a ferry, looking back to England.  The style of After Love changes sharply at this point, as Fahima sees part of the white cliffs of Dover collapse symbolically into the sea.

Ahmed worked on the Dover-Calais ferries, and Geneviève lives in Calais.  Fahima books into a small Calais hotel and soon turns up at Geneviève’s house.  By coincidence, she’s moving elsewhere at the end of the week, and needs help with clearing out and packing up.  She assumes the unknown woman on her doorstep is the agency help she’s requested.  Until she converted to Islam and married Ahmed, Fahima’s name was Mary – the name she now gives when Geneviève asks for one.  (I’ll refer to her as Mary henceforth.)  By taking advantage of the crossed wires as to who she is, Mary gains access to the house for several days and discovers more about her husband’s secret life.  Its chief and most startling manifestation is Solomon (Talid Ariss) – Ahmed and Geneviève’s teenage son.

Visual departures from reality like the collapsing cliffs are rare in the rest of After Love but it might be objected that the plotting, from the point that Mary travels to France, strains credibility.  I believed what was happening thanks to Aleem Khan’s skilful writing, and his lead player.  Mary is that rare screen character – someone whose isolation isn’t just a matter of convenience to the film-maker but is properly rooted in her particular identity.  Mary and Ahmed were teenage sweethearts.  Khan doesn’t need to make a big deal of their families’ opposition for the audience to believe how controversial an interracial relationship would have been in England forty-odd years ago.  Mary is now a childless woman in her late fifties.  Her social life is in the ethnic community into which she married.  She naturally assumes that none of Ahmed’s family knew his secret.  She really does have no one to confide in.

Mary’s progress to Geneviève’s front door is persuasively tentative.  When she first phones Geneviève’s number and hears her voice, she can’t speak and the call ends.  In her hotel room mirror Mary practices introducing herself; when the moment actually arrives she’s again struck dumb.   It’s because she’s tongue-tied that Mary initially fails to correct Geneviève’s misunderstanding; because Geneviève is impatient and fast-talking she gives Mary time to realise the potential of subterfuge (which Joanna Scanlan’s face subtly registers).  It’s plausible, too, that Geneviève isn’t curious as to why a hijab-wearing British woman who speaks no French is working as an agency cleaner in Calais.  Geneviève, preoccupied with the imminent move, sees Mary as a means to that end.  Mary is very soon making herself useful.  That’s all Geneviève needs.

And Joanna Scanlan’s eloquence is all the viewer needs to feel the weight on Mary of Ahmed’s betrayal.  For love of him, she made the transition to an alien religious tradition and a family life based in it.  In a foreign country just twenty-odd miles from his and Mary’s home, he’s had a second life not only secret but also secular.  Svelte, smart-casual Geneviève, who drinks, smokes and speaks good English, perfectly embodies this other world.  In the privacy of the hotel room Mary is emotionally and physically uncovered.  Even from a position of prostrate prayer her movement into abject sobbing is a remarkable collapse.  She examines her overweight body, particularly its stretch marks.  Later on, she looks at a photograph of her and Ahmed’s younger selves, with a baby.  Aleem Khan shows a sure and sensitive touch in revealing that Mary and Geneviève have motherhood in common, or, at least, had.  Mary and Ahmed’s only child died at four months old.

Thirty-five-year-old Khan, whose first feature this is (he’s written and directed three short films), has worked things out with care.  Elements which are hard to swallow at first come to make sense.  For example, Geneviève continues sending texts to Ahmed, which go unanswered though not unseen by his widow.  It’s puzzling that Geneviève doesn’t show more than mild irritation at this until she mentions to Mary that Ahmed is bad at keeping in touch and ‘hardly ever here’.  Because of that, Geneviève sees other men – a source of considerable friction between her and Solomon, who keeps angrily insisting that he wants to live with his father instead.

After Love gradually accumulates an extensive tangle of secrets and deceptions.  Mary didn’t know of the existence of Geneviève or Solomon.  They don’t know who she really is, or that Ahmed is dead.  Solomon isn’t aware his father has a wife in England; Geneviève is, but was told by Ahmed that she’s a Pakistani (and that they’ve never had children).  Solomon, thinking the house is empty, brings another boy home from school and they start making love.  When Solomon realises Mary’s there and has seen what’s going on, he furiously, fearfully orders her not to tell his mother.  For Mary, it’s a brutal irony that keeping secrets was a necessary part of her and Ahmed’s teenage courtship.  Ahmed’s family knows nothing of his double life, or of what Mary discovers.

Solomon’s attitude to Mary is at first scornful and surly.  The growing antipathy between him and his mother helps give credibility to his warming to Mary and responding to the questions she needs answers to.  When she asks if he’s ever been to England he tells her only once, on a school day trip to Dover Castle.  While in Dover, he tried to get away from the school party and meet up with Ahmed, who was annoyed when Solomon contacted him; Mary assures him his father was probably just worried by the idea of Solomon going off alone in a place he didn’t know.  Khan’s handling of this part of the story is well judged, too.  He and Scanlan capture the tension between Mary’s anguish that Solomon even exists, growing feelings for him, and realisation that she can go only so far.  At one point, she oversteps the mark:  Mary doesn’t respond to Geneviève’s texts to Ahmed but can’t resist replying to one from Solomon.  This affectionate response, supposedly from Ahmed, gives Solomon false hope about moving in with his father.  Mary has to abort the text conversation, distressing Solomon in the process.

On the eve of the house move, everything chez Geneviève is boxed up and ready to go.  Solomon’s mother is out (it’s implied with her latest man); when he says he’s hungry Mary unpacks a few things and prepares them an improvised Asian meal with what comes to hand – spinach, tortillas (substituting for roti), and so on.  Solomon praises the ‘delicious’ food and, watching how Mary handles it on her plate, tells her, ‘You eat like my Dad’.  It’s a lovely scene, pregnant with meaning, but it also proves unfortunately pivotal in the narrative.  This turning point is triggered by Geneviève’s arrival home.  She’s unsurprisingly irritated to find Mary still there when her services are no longer required, as well as by Solomon’s unaccustomed enthusiasm for an evening meal.  Mother and son are soon arguing; after Geneviève rudely and petulantly disparages the food (‘Needs more salt’), Solomon spits in her face, and Mary slaps Solomon’s.  She does so instinctively yet the slap feels improbably melodramatic – it’s the first in a series of false moves.

Solomon storms out.  Shocked and angry, Geneviève asks Mary, ‘Who do you think you are?’  She gets her answer but not until the following day when Mary turns up at the new house and reveals all.  Geneviève chucks her out, after berating Mary for her deception.  I didn’t get why this showdown hadn’t happened in the immediate aftermath of the slap – except that that would have ruled out a second showdown.  Khan curiously omits Mary’s immediate reaction to Geneviève’s tirade.  Instead, the action switches back to England.  A scene of Mary attending another aqiqah gives way to one in a cemetery, where she visits Ahmed’s grave and, beside it, the grave of their son.  She looks up to see Geneviève and Solomon standing nearby.   Next thing, these two are guests in Mary’s home.  Khan gives no clue as to how this visit, and the implicit rapprochement that enables it, have come about.

Solomon looks through things in Mary’s house, and finds cassette-tape recordings Ahmed made for Mary when they were young.  Mary’s angry distress when she hears one of the tapes playing is short-lived.  She decides to give the recording to Solomon.  It’s because After Love is, for the most part, so convincing that the unhappiness of the story feels acutely real.  To that extent, you’re grateful for the ‘healing’ conclusion even though you don’t believe it.  That said, the final embrace between Mary and Solomon, when she’s given him the recording of Ahmed’s voice, is moving, and the closing shot – of Mary, Geneviève and Solomon standing on the Dover cliffs – effective.  As in the opening scene, the shot is held for a long time – long enough for the viewer’s mind to stray into larger thoughts about cultural transition, immigration and the distance from Calais to Dover.

All good things come to an end:  it’s a pity that, in the case of After Love, that happens ten minutes or so before it’s actually over.  But it certainly is a good thing for most of its running time.  Finely photographed by Alexander Dynan and discreetly scored by Chris Roe, this debut feature leaves you eager to see what Aleem Khan will do next.  I wanted to watch his film at the first opportunity because I already felt that way about Joanna Scanlan – especially in light of her work in Pin Cushion (2017).  It’s an understatement to say that, after After Love, the feeling is the same.

18 October 2020