After Louise by Michael Muller - Eight out of 10

After Louise by Michael Muller

Eight out of 10

Even if After Louise is not monumental or astounding, this independent motion picture does not seem to be light years away from this year’s nominees for the Golden Globes and a good guess is that it will not be so far from those that would be mentioned at the Oscars – Knives Out comes to mind http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/12/knives-out-written-and-directed-by-rian.html

Nonetheless, this movie has only 1 (one!) user mentioning it on IMDB and no critic there yet, which seems unfair, since it appears to be just as good as The Farewell, another nominee for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-farewell-written-and-directed-by.html

Granted, The Parasite, by far the best production of 2019 and one of the best of the decade and in history - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/08/parasite-written-by-jin-won-han-and.html - winner of The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which beats the Oscars in terms of value by a long shot, towers over other recent features and would be difficult to compare with After Louise, but also with the golden Globe winners of the year…to be announced in just three days

Kath aka formidable Alice Sykes is the main character of this movie, and she is getting married in the first few scenes, though the ceremony is soon botched and it abruptly becomes a nightmare, when her groom, Steve, fails to mention her mother, as they had agreed, and then in an adjacent room, there is a confrontation in which another element brings about the ultimate collapse, when she learns that the preparations for their new accommodation had been changed and thus she thinks she is forced – we would all find more on the subject later – to take drastic measures.

Meanwhile, we have seen the gardener, Bob aka excellent Greg Wise – when looking through memory, it was impossible for this cinephile to identify the film in which he had seen the artist, but consulting the same IMDB, we can find that he has been the vicious deceiver in Sense and Sensibility, a masterpiece signed for the big screen by Emma Thompson – behave strangely, reading through his mail, calling a hospital and finding that if he is to see the patient he inquires about, he must hurry.

Bob talks with the manager of the hotel about his trip and we find that he is actually on some sort of parole and if he gets into trouble, he would be locked up as a consequence of his impromptu journey, for which he appears rather unprepared, since he looks like he suffers from some condition – though that turns out to be more of a depression, a deep feeling of guilt, a broken heart over a past love affair that had ended tragically and for which he is to some extent responsible, no matter how much more he would pay for it…more than he deserved apparently.

Kath departs in a hurry, trying to exit with her father’s –Ken – old Mercedes, which she would badly scratch in the escape, when the gardener is also on his way to the station, and as he takes the ring which the escaping bride – that recalls, no matter how different this is The Graduate with the historic, paradigmatic flight from the church – he is also trapped in the moving vehicle, in which he has a fit ad starts behaving like a trapped child or some adult with serious issues – which might be something of a flaw in the film, considering that the man is so ill and his suffering does not justify the exaggerated breakdown.

The driver stops, finds he has to go to the railway station and then, upon discovering that the town he has to travel to is on her itinerary, she offers naturally to give him a lift and they are about to eat in a small place by the road, when we see again that the man is quite bizarre, for he looks at the menu and asks for ‘beans’, from looking at the photos of the items on the menu, even when he is told that this might be a problem for this is just art of another dish…they solve this nevertheless, when Kath offers to take the stuff that Bob does not want on her ‘Olympic breakfast plate’ to the astonishment of the waitress…

As is to be expected, the two get close, not as close as this viewer was thinking, for they do not end up in bed together, as appeared to be the case, taking into account the major failure of the groom, who took the orders of the father-in-law, to avoid mentioning the deceased mother, upon the request of his bride, the fact that the gardener turns out to be sensitive, kind, soft, gentle, considerate – he takes the sheets and covers the girl, when they share the same room in a motel, after she drives the car into a ditch, falling asleep at the wheel, when he had insisted they need to get to the hospital – and not mad, apart from the fact that the next morning, when the young woman wakes up, she finds her underwear, bra, hanging in the bathroom, after apparently being washed by the quite strange and in the era of MeToo, abusive man…

Indeed, we have no idea – the undersigned does not know and if you do, let him know – how on earth had he done that, without waking the companion up, then putting her dress back on and finally, drawing a portrait of a naked woman, albeit the subject is in fact the one he had loved many years ago, when he had been in art school, they were lovers, they had an argument and then a catastrophe would take place, but most of the major details are left out, to avoid spoiler alerts, even if the chances of these words being read here by someone keen on seeing the movie and then finding it somewhere are around one in a billion…

After Louise is not transformational, educational, magnificent or transcendent, but for this cinephile is just about as good as the motion pictures mentioned earlier, which would bask in the glory of the Golden Globes, three days from now…