The characters in “After Love” spend a lot of time looking into mirrors. Mary (Joanna Scanlan), an English woman who became a devout convert to Islam when she married her husband Ahmed, discovers days after his death that he was living a double life with another woman. In a mirror, she practices what she wants to say to that woman. Later, she sees the woman, slim, blonde, and sophisticated, wearing jeans in contrast to the traditional coverings of Mary’s faith. Again, looking into a mirror, she gazes at her exposed body, running her hands over her skin.
There are metaphorical mirrored reflections as well. It is the story of two women looking at each other, first to see what makes them different, then to see what connects them.
Ahmed captained a ferry that crossed the water separating England from France, what the British call the English Channel, and the French call La Manche. In the days after his death, Mary replays a loving voicemail he left her, affectionately chiding her not to get too close to the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover when she goes to wave at his ferry boat. She believed the man she had been with since they were teenagers was as devoted to her as he was to him. But she discovered another woman in his life, Genevieve (Nathalie Richard), from the French side of the water.
And so Mary, who has spent so much time gazing across the Channel, crosses it to confront the other woman. She looks into a mirror to practice what she will say. But when the time comes, standing at the doorway, as Genevieve approaches, she cannot find her voice. Instead, Genevieve, a sophisticated, confident woman, sees a lower-class English woman with a head covering and assumes she must be a cleaning lady. She tells Mary to do the laundry, and a few minutes later, Mary buries her nose in one of Ahmed’s shirts.
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