APRÈS LUI (AFTER HIM)
Directed by Gaël Morel
Produced by Laurent Lavolé & Isabelle Pragier
Written by Morel & Christophe Honoré
Released by IFC Films
French with English subtitles
USA. 91 min. Not Rated
With Catherine Deneuve, Thomas Dumerchez, Guy Marchand, Élodie Bouchez & Elli Medeiros
 

Catherine Deneuve has never been the most expressive actress, which is what makes her performance in Après Lui (After Him) especially surprising—and devastating. Deneuve plays Camille, a mother very close to her twentysomething free-spirited son Mathieu—the opening sequence has her helping him and his best friend Franck put on makeup as they dress in drag before an evening out. After he’s killed in a horrific car accident, she gradually comes apart.

Gaël Morel’s movie encompasses Camille’s increasingly desperate attempts to deal with her beloved son’s death, first by not blaming Franck (he was driving), and then slowly bringing him into her life. She welcomes him to the funeral despite her ex-husband’s and daughter’s vociferous protests, sets up a job for him at her bookstore, and befriends him at the expense of her family.

Working from a perceptive script by himself and Christophe Honoré (best known for his relationship musical Love Songs), Morel directs straightforwardly, finding it unnecessary to further ramp up the emotion on what’s already a tragically fraught subject. He allows his talented actors breathing room to develop their characters as they find themselves in progressively dire emotional straits following Mathieu’s death. Élodie Bouchez, the miraculous actress from The Dreamlife of Angels, invests her scenes as the daughter with a rawness that contrasts with the distant Camille. Thomas Dumerchez’s Franck has a slightly stiff quality; whether it’s the actor or the role, it fits the character’s difficulty in handling the implications of Camille as his new “friend.”

Then there’s Deneuve’s revelatory portrayal. Now in her mid 60s, Deneuve can’t help but look glamorous in whatever she’s in. And here she’s also heartbreaking as a woman whose grief forces her to hang onto a semblance of her son’s spirit, even if that means latching onto the last person who saw him alive and alienating her family and friends. Morel many times simply trains his camera on Deneuve’s face, whose varied expressions clue us into her confused mental state in ways that any amount of shouted dialogue or unrelieved sobbing can’t. The movie’s final, austere close-up of Deneuve staring at a sleeping Franck—as the camera slowly moves in to capture the look in those famous brown eyes, now empty, worn out, and forlorn—is an unforgettable end to a probing, subtle drama. Kevin Filipski
August 11, 2009