After Sex (1997)

As Good As It Gets

Admirable film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Maybe this would be a better movie if I spoke French. Although, actually I prefer subtitled movies to dubbed ones. The film wasn't awful, it just wasn't good. It bored me. I can point to no part or cast or crew that was any better or any worse than the whole. Don't waste your time. Grade: D-

Two scenes illustrate the subtlety and sophistication of this film. In the opening sequence, the image of a cat in heat is followed by that of the heroine-director writhing in the throes of a self-administered orgasm. In a contrasting scene, following some clothes-ripping sex, we see our heroine crossing the street *floating on a little cloud*. Rather than a portrait of uncontrollable "animal" passion, this film has the feel of a manifesto: you men think you can portray female sexuality, *I* know what it's really like. But there is no genuine sensuality here, only hysterical febrility. After the sensitive portrayals of _Outremer_, rooted in historical reality, the creation of this empty cat-woman and her so-predictable stud is most disappointing. Even the implausible secondary plot of an elderly woman who murders her husband is refreshing by comparison.

It is a typical European movie and a typical woman's movie. If you happen to like both, as I do, you will find it quite captivating and well made. There is not much action per se though quite a few nude sex scenes, done quite tastefully and not pruriently. The acting is good, the cinematography is average European, which is also good. There is some suspense. It is definitely not the best movie my wife and I have ever watched but we did not grudge the time and only once or twice felt like fast forwarding but the very next frame changed our minds.

The movie is at its best when it just captures the feverish substance of her passion, which it does vividly and candidly with a striking lack of self-consciousness on Rouan's part. But in its specifics, particularly in how it sets up the various male reactions to her behavior, the movie often seems somewhat schematic and labored, if not tedious. Her husband is defending a woman who stabbed her husband in the neck because of his affair - as he practices and prepares for her defence he copes with his growing knowledge of Rouan's adultery, and in that process can't help but argue in mitigation of his own wife; the mechanism seems clunky, if only because high-profile murders are such overly familiar, convenient thematic vessels for one thing or the other. The inspiration she provides to her main writer (who names his book after her description of a man's sweat) is too easy an external validation rather than a riding of the waves she creates for herself. The scenes of her trashed state are too much decrepit chic. Not that the overall trajectory doesn't more or less work, but the film constantly seems to be battling its own limitations, the restrictions it places on its central turbulence. The ending certainly seemed to me a very melodramatic signaling of redemption.