Joachim Lafosse – After Love #LFF2016

PODCAST | Matt Micucci interviews Joachim Lafosse, director of After Love, from the 60th BFI London Film Festival.

Joachim Lafosse’s film After Love is the story of a couple, married with kids, in its dying days. The French title of the movie, L’Economie du couple, cleverly seems to single out money problems behind the reason for their falling out, but as the film shows in its development, there is something more personal behind it. In fact, as Lafosse says in this interview, there is another love story that flourishes out of this sorry situation.

The film is impressive because it feels real. There are things that come together in it to make it a truly powerful viewing experience. One is the cinematography which, together with the close setting – the house in which the story and the vast majority of the narrative of that place – lends After Love a close and intimate power and intensity. And then there is the acting, headed by Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn, negotiating the terms of their divorce and their own personal emotions throughout the film. Lafosse talks about how he worked with them, and at some point reveals that one of the films he likes the most is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, specifying that he has always looked for his very own Elizabeth Taylor and that, for After Love, he found her in the form of Bejo.

AFTER LOVE. Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn star in this insightful, emotionally affecting look at the final weeks in a marriage. The original title translates as ‘The Economy of the Couple’, and here shared life (house, children) is a currency that must be negotiated in the breakup. Living in a bijou converted garage in Brussels with their eight-year-old twin daughters, Boris and Marie’s relationship is in the spluttering last few days; every sight of Boris brings Marie’s disappointment to the surface. He knows it, but is boorishly convinced he can charm his way out of the crisis. Plus, he can’t afford to move out. Our Children (LFF2012) director Joachim Lafosse (whose actors prepped by watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), gives two of cinema’s finer actors a fantastic script to riff off. The result is a complex, tender portrait of the brittleness of relationships. It may be a small window on these lives but what it reveals speaks volumes.