User Reviews

to comment on this film. It received a mainstream release in Australia, although it was hardly a raging success. The biggest thing about it was that Catherine Deneuve was here for the premiere.

Anyway, it's not much of a film. The user rating is about 5.5, and that's not far wrong. Anybody reading this probably knows the setup, but for those who don't it's about a woman whose son is killed in a car accident. The car was driven by his best friend. Although the woman's ex-husband and daughter regard the other boy as almost a murderer, the mother doesn't, and forms a relationship with him. (Not a sexual relationship.) That setup itself makes you think.

The problem is that it didn't make the makers think hard enough. The film goes nowhere. Catherine Deneuve as the mother does reasonably well with a difficult part, and she's the only one I was interested in.

It's not bad, it's just not really worth bothering with.

As the only review of Après Lui at the moment is rather a negative one, I feel the need to say that this film is an intensive journey through the pain of human loss and the desperate search to regain a grip on life. Nobody understands Camille, which leads to sad and often lonely moments. This film is beautifully written and directed. Gaël Morel is a fine director who deserves a wide audience for his work. His leading actress Catherine Deneuve is impressive, but this is also the case with promising young actors as Dumerchez (who also played the lead in Morel's Le Clan) and Jolivet. On the soundtrack Beth Gibbons with the song Mysteries which brings back happy memories for someone who isn't there anymore. An English subtitled DVD is now available in Australia.

' Apres Lui ' is not the best of Gael Morel's work as a director, but it is still a fine film. In my opinion ' Notre Paradis ' is his finest; a film that I watch more often than his other films. But for Catherine Deneuve I believe this to be one of her very best roles, and that is high praise as she has consistently acted well during her career. To understand ' Apres Lui ' is difficult, and understandably so as it depends a lot upon sexual ambiguity. It opens with a scene of two young men in drag dancing and having fun on a bed and ends with someone ( no spoilers ) looking at a sleeping, half naked young man on a bed. In between these two scenes the scenario consists of a grieving mother, played by Deneuve who has lost her son in a car accident. He was one of the couple in the opening scene and the other was the driver who skidded off the road into a tree. Deneuve becomes more and more involved with the driver, to the horror of her relatives, and becomes more and more bizarre in her behaviour. Dressed in a black leather jacket, and trousers and boots to match she looks formidable, and her semi-rejection of her daughter and her new born child seemed to me an almost total rejection of heteronormative values. Her grief is intense, but so is her relationship with the driver of the car. The film is reticent about explicit motives, and this makes it for me confusing, but even more interesting to watch. Gael Morel directs and what a superb director he is, and this film to my knowledge has not received as much attention as it should have been. Sad this as it shows that many viewers lack imagination, and for me imagination is the key to any understanding of so-called difficult films.