![]() It’s just waiting to get down to the sexytimes between Rachael and Stefan. ![]() Rachael is appalled by this, and who can blame her, for not wanting to live side by side with an only-just-defeated enemy who was bent on world domination? Although, also, who can countenance this, what with Stefan being no Nazi, just a poor hapless defeated bystander? The Aftermath exists in a strange limbo between winners and losers of the war, and yet it doesn’t want to deal with such matters as happenstance of birth - no one gets to choose which country and which culture they’re born in - or the vagaries of conflict. ![]() (The house will be fetishized by the film in precisely the same way that the suffering of survivors in the city will be all but ignored.) Initially Stefan withdraws with Freda to the bigger-than-any-apartment-you’ve-ever-lived-in (so: hardly awful) attic while they wait to be moved to ominously referenced “the camps” (another thing that is rather oblique here, and another problem), until the evidently softhearted Lewis suggests that the Luberts just stay, and that they all share the house. The Morgans will be living in the stately manor of architect Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård: Big Little Lies, The Legend of Tarzan) and his teenaged daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann) his wife, Freda’s mother, was killed in the firebombing of the city, but the beautiful house, in the forested countryside, survived. The film opens with Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley: Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge, Collateral Beauty) arriving in Hamburg - reduced to rubble by the war - in 1946 to join her British army officer husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke: Serenity, First Man), who has something to do with the British cleanup effort (it’s never really clear what his job is, and this will be part of the problem with this movie stay tuned). Apparently it was not common for British officers to be billeted the homes of German nationals during the reconstruction, but it did happen at least occasionally… and that’s the setting for this cinematic adaptation of the book (which I have not read). British novelist Rhidian Brook was inspired to write what would become his bestseller The Aftermath by his grandfather’s experience in Germany in the immediate postwar period. Stories of the specific human impact are important, and need to be heard, as widely as possible.Īnd here we have - ostensibly - yet another of those new stories, one fictionalized from reality, but still. We shouldn’t forget how awful this war was. (My god, if we suddenly decided that the stories of nonwhite nonmen were worth telling, we’d be finding new tales of the war for the rest of human existence.) It’s a measure of the all-encompassing devastation that conflict created, of how wide its impact was, that we are able to continually rediscover horrible new angles on it. And that’s even given how narrow the perspective of Western cinema tends to be, prioritizing the POVs of white men. I’ve said it many times before: I’m stunned at how it seems we will simply never run out of previously untold stories of World War II.
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