Post World War II, a British colonel and his wife are assigned to live in Hamburg during the post-war reconstruction, but tensions arise with the German who previously owned the house.
Based on the book by the same name, “The Aftermath” delves deep into the period piece romance delivering on what we have come to know and love about the genre overall. Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke) and his wife Rachel Morgan (Keira Knightley) move into a gorgeous German Manse outside Hamburg while Lewis helps a beaten German population recover themselves fresh after World War Two. They live in this mansion they’ve seized alongside its original occupants: a German man, Herr Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) and his teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann.) Both sides struggle to find the humanity in each other until Rachel and Herr Hubert fall in love.
Soft gasps and deep sighs accompanied by longing looks flourish throughout the film. It’s an overly soft movie with sequences so quiet the audience held its breath and music so elegant I (a twenty-five-year-old boy) felt like I didn’t belong in the theater. This movie basks in its elegant tone, adding heft to its scandalous sex scene and joy to the emotional rebounding each character goes through.
These movies are life to actors, offering a complex range of emotions for them to chew through (often without words) and these actors soak up the screen. Between Jason Clarke’s wounded stoicism, Keira Knightley’s confused frustration, and Alexander Skarsgard’s patented wounded hunch, no character is left untouched. All are flawed. All are prejudiced. All carry deep wounds. Interestingly enough, it is Jason Clarke’s English general we empathize with the most as he tries desperately to navigate the moral conflicts provided in a post-war landscape.
The aforementioned Manse they all live in occupies the place in our dreams we constantly imagine ourselves moving into once we become rich. Wooden flooring, art on every wall, a Steinway piano in a sunlit drawing room. It’s well textured, incredibly well decorated, and particularly dreamy. I applaud the director of photography for working in concert with the production designer so well. They knew they had an incredible location on their hands and they maximized its potential. In that sense, the camerawork highlights the textured lighting throughout the film and deft color changes contribute either a sense of joy or a sense of loss.
It’s well made and well designed. It’s well acted and well edited. It’s a film with plenty of tonality to it. It rings much like other war drama romances from the past: “Allied,” “Atonement” (another Keira Knightley movie), and so on. The list is extensive and this movie contributes another great movie to that genre overall. If war romance movies are your thing then this is for you.
In theaters Friday, March 29th
