Past Programs
Grief - 2008
After Him (Après lui)
27/03/2008
Two young men -- possibly gay -- are dancing, and clowning, dressing up, with wigs, and lipstick in a bedroom. They are Mathieu and his friend Franck. Then Mathieu's mother Camille comes in and, laughing, she helps fix their makeup. They set off for a party in high humour.
And this is almost the last we see of Mathieu. Some time later Camille (Catherine Deneuve) gets a shocking phone call. Mathieu is dead, killed in a car smash. Camille is briefly numb, numb enough to call her daughter, and her ex-husband, to go to the hospital. Then hysterical, racked with grief. At the funeral she rebuffs her daughter, who wants to talk to her, and drives to the spot where the accident happened, the tree hit by the car. There she finds Franck, too miserable to come to the funeral. Catherine insists he come back with her to the wake. Other guests are appalled, and he leaves. But Catherine will not, cannot, leave him alone.
At first, I thought she was wanting not to lose Mathieu, to keep a hold of him by sharing memories with Franck, hearing stories she had not known. But soon she is crossing other boundaries.
Interviewing his university tutors. Giving him gifts. Trying to buy him out of working with his father. To run his life. Is she trying to remake Franck in Mathieu's image? Trying to replace one son with another? The relationship between Catherine and Franck (Thomas Dumerchez) is uneasy, unstable -- and later quite startling.
After Him is a third feature film from Gael Morel, a young actor turned writer-director, a protégé of Catherine Deneuve's long time collaborator, Andre Techine. It's a bold concept, this study of grief which becomes a kind of compulsion. Move on, say all the grief counsellors. But what if one can't? What if one doesn't in fact want to move on? And Catherine Deneuve gives a gutsy performance here.
I would quarrel once or twice with the tone. The notes struck. My limited experience of death, of shocking sudden death of someone close to you, is that numbness takes over. A kind of adrenaline fuelled shutdown which carries one through the painful social obligations of funeral rites. I think Deneuve gives way to a storm of grief too early in the film to be convincing. But maybe that's just my experience.
There is also the matter of the tree where Mathieu died. It becomes a great big symbol, as we know such sites do. We have all passed those sad little memorials taped to trees and other objects by a roadside.
We will revisit this tree several times in this film. And not in a good, that is dramatically convincing, way.
But these missteps aside, this film is saying something quite intelligent, and unsettling as well. With all its imperfections I think I prefer it to the celebrated Ozon film, Under the Sand, another original study of grief. After Him is well worth your attention.
