Après l'Amour

Thirty-year-old novelist Lola (Huppert) is involved with two men: David (Giraudeau), an architect, and Tom (Girardot), a guitarist. Both are unhappily married with kids. Lola tries to maintain her independence, to conduct her affairs on her own terms, but age is catching up with her, and her freedom is an illusion of sorts, perhaps just a subtler form of entrapment. And after love, there is punishment. You may not agree with Kurys' thesis, but it's sincere. Her mise-en-scène gains in immediacy and spontaneity, and the acting is surprisingly forceful, given that the characters are mostly ineffectual. Finally, however, the narrow perspective doesn't square with the movie's pretensions to art: one longs for more dangerous liaisons, and when Kurys tries to reach out towards other people, other lives, the film loses its definition.