After Love

The White Cliffs of Dover, an endur­ing sym­bol of British nation­al­ism, take on a dif­fer­ent mean­ing in Aleem Khan’s debut fea­ture After Love. For Mary Hus­sein (Joan­na Scan­lan), the crum­bling chalk façade rep­re­sents her iden­ti­ty and sense of self, erod­ing away and grow­ing ever distant.

Mary is a British Mus­lim con­vert who is hap­pi­ly mar­ried to Ahmed (Nass­er Memarzia). Ful­ly inte­grat­ed into his cul­ture, she prays five times a day, wears tra­di­tion­al Pak­istani dress, dec­o­rates her home with framed Islam­ic scrip­ture and cooks aloo palak from scratch. When Ahmed dies sud­den­ly, Mary is under­stand­ably dev­as­tat­ed. She stares, glassy-eyed, from her crisp, white widow’s hijab, bro­ken and hollow.

A day after Ahmed’s funer­al, Mary is scrolling through his phone when she dis­cov­ers that he had a secret fam­i­ly just across the Chan­nel. Unable to go on with­out ful­ly know­ing the truth about the man she adored, she trav­els to Calais leav­ing the col­laps­ing cliffs in her wake.

Scanlan’s per­for­mance is extra­or­di­nary, her depic­tion of grief is at once beau­ti­ful and ago­nis­ing to behold. For much of the film she acts alone: col­laps­ing into the sea and allow­ing the waves wash over her; rehears­ing pleas­antries and star­ing at her­self naked in the mir­ror; squeez­ing the fat and paw­ing at her stretch marks to try and find an expla­na­tion as to how the hus­band she was ded­i­cat­ed to could do this to her.

For all that we learn about the flaws in their rela­tion­ship, the film does not have us doubt that theirs was still, in many ways, a hap­py mar­riage, and Mary’s grief is ulti­mate­ly an expres­sion of love. The care with which she con­tin­ues to fold his shirts and gaze at his image belies a deep well of affec­tion. Scan­lan is able to exe­cute this com­bi­na­tion of warmth and betray­al with rare naturalism.

Writer/​director Aleem Khan’s debut fea­ture, fol­low­ing his won­der­ful short from 2014, Three Broth­ers, draws all the char­ac­ters with unusu­al depth and nuance. Many of the deci­sions they make are shock­ing not for the con­flict that ensues but the kind­ness and empa­thy they show one anoth­er. Even his approach to Ahmed is gen­tle and under­stand­ing. Khan places no weight or judge­ment on Mary’s spir­i­tu­al or cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tions but rather uses it to con­vey how meet­ing Ahmed trans­formed her com­plete­ly. Even after his death his influ­ence is not some­thing she can sim­ply ignore.

The sup­port­ing cast play their part and the fast bonds that Mary forms with them are com­plex but con­vinc­ing, After Love still belongs to Scan­lan, who exudes thought­ful­ness and emo­tion­al intel­li­gence even when star­ing out of a bus win­dow. The film doesn’t deal in huge twists and turns but instead slow­ly unspools as a char­ac­ter study of all those affect­ed by Ahmed’s indis­cre­tions and the com­plic­it role they all played in them. The images of Mary and the White Cliffs of Dover will stay with you long after the cred­its have rolled.