Review: Love After Love

Melding the roiling intimacy of John Cassavetes with the intense emotionalism of Ingmar Bergman may seem an experiment in bleakness for most filmmakers but, in the hands of writer-director Russell Harbaugh, it results in a masterful portrait of a family dealing with the loss of a loved one in his elegant feature debut, Love After Love.

Harbaugh is confident enough to immediately immerse viewers in the midst of the film's central family with little explanation. Take the opening scene between matriarch Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) and her eldest son, Nick (Chris O'Dowd). It may seem an innocuous enough conversation, a man asking his mother about happiness. Yet observe the words that are unspoken and the actual meaning behind the words that are uttered. "She feels like family," she notes of Rebecca, though Nick believes his relationship is "too clean." The conversation is essentially Nick asking for justification to cheat on his girlfriend Rebecca (Juliet Rylance), with Suzanne hoping to steer him otherwise.

Indeed, Nick's imminent decision to break with Rebecca in favour of a younger model - in this case, an actress named Emilie (Dree Hemingway) - is not the only sea change afoot. Patriarch Glenn (Gareth Williams), first seen holding court during a family barbecue, is soon in rapid decline from an unspecified illness. When he mercifully passes, his absence sets his already aimless younger son Chris (James Adomian) even more adrift, his increased alcohol consumption resulting in a scene that finds Nick completely mortified in front of his future in-laws. Suzanne, still a vibrant and sensual woman, wades into the dating pool, first with a colleague and then with Michael (Matt Salinger), about whom she feels serious enough to have meet her sons. The meeting does not go well.

The narrative is elliptical, fragmented, almost pointillist. There's a certain unpredictability and yet inevitability to how things unfold. Though it rarely, if ever, delves into histrionics, words and emotions detonate like powder kegs. "Rebecca was a person of real consequence," Suzanne tells Nick at one point, and the comment is like a gut punch. Nick's toast to Michael is at first jovial, then viperish in its resentment, the real target of which is his mother. Nick's anger also gets the better of him as he reacts to Rebecca's refusal to take him back, souring a moment that had been full of honest regret. On paper, these moments may seem minor, perhaps even pedestrian, but they lacerate on-screen and are almost too uncomfortably raw to bear.

The cast are uniformly excellent, with MacDowell and O'Dowd especially noteworthy. The latter imbues sensitivity in a character that could have solely been an unrepentant jerk, whilst the former combines warmth and prickliness to mesmerising effect.

Love After Love

Directed by: Russell Harbaugh

Written by: Russell Harbaugh, Eric Mendelsohn

Starring: Andie MacDowell, Chris O'Dowd, James Adomian, Juliet Rylance, Dree Hemingway, Gareth Williams, Matt Salinger