User Reviews

I saw this movie at our local film festival, and I had reasonable hopes it will tackle the topic of healing from an extremist youth. Even in the news, you sometimes read stories about terrorists who did come to grips with the dark side of their earlier path, or convicts who work with other convicts to help them rehabilitate - so excuse me for having expectations based on the catchy title...

None of that in this movie. Our protagonist has half reformed (he did stop killing people) but has no remorse or answers for the terrible actions in his past. Worse, he has no answers or thoughts about the collateral damage of his past actions. Instead, he's a self-centered, self-righteous dude who, besides the "minor inconveniences" his relatives suffer (such as being physically attacked, or losing a job, or having a career stunted - which arguably he's not single handedly responsible for) is about to destroy his daughter's future (that one is squarely on him). His grand plan of fleeing the country and uprooting his 16 year old daughter from the environment she grew up in and move to a place with obviously fewer opportunities - is quickly dispatched with by the director by injecting an unlikely accident that circumvents all the hard moral questions and leads to an awkward "happy ending".

This movie's title is a sham. The movie does not address any "after". Marco's war is still very much ongoing; he's a ruthless, selfish character who over the 20 years that have passed did not have any revelations - except the bitter realization that he "lost" his war. He continues to step over his family's bodies trying to escape his past.

The political thriller is one of the best traditions in European film making. For Annarita Zambrano to move into this company with her first feature AFTER THE WAR, with a first time writer and young Charlotte Cétaire in her first role, is a big ask and it's impressive to see how far they get.

The opening is riveting, with a university professor leaving an angry 2002 student meeting to be gunned down. The assassin claims to be from The New Armed Faction for the Revolution, a long dormant Italian movement from the "Years of Lead" eighties political turmoil.

This impacts on Giuseppe Battison, one of the movement's former leaders now sheltering in France under a Mitterand era amnesty. One of his fellow exiles has been repatriated to face jail in his native Italy and Battison goes on the run, hiding out in a dilapidated Contis des Bains farm with his daughter Cétaire who was about to compete in her school sports contest and sit for her bac.

This is a treatment of a dominant Sidney Lumet preoccupation, the grown children of the second half Twentieth Century left. Think DANIEL, RUNNING ON EMPTY or GARBO TALKS. It makes an interesting comparison.

Parallel with Battison's flight, his sister the still great looking Barbora Bobulova finds her association with a terrorist brother she hasn't seen for twenty years jeopardises her position as a lecturer, her progressive judge husband's election as chief magistrate and the safety of her mother Elisabetta Piccolomini through whose window a brick with the word "assassin" has been heaved.

The weight of the film falls on Battison whose character is given exceptional depth. He killed the judge who had condemned his associates in front of the man's eight year old child but only after he had seen his own brother shot down "sous mes yeux" by police after he had surrendered his weapon. Speaking French, (this is a French movie despite it's Italian star and subject) he is stretched to his limits. The amiable fat man comic of his earlier films has a role which would have challenged Gian Maria Volonte at his peak. The ending we are given fails to exploit the tensions the film has established.

Zambrano's handling is more at ease with film form, spacing the dialogue with effective locating footage - Bobulova in the street with graffiti like that of the opening, Cétaire caressing the kittens in the barn or cycling through the striped shadows the line of trees throw on the road or the glimpsed night time fair.

With it's possibly inevitable shortcomings AFTER THE WAR is still an imposing piece of work. It should be seen.