After Fall, Winter

If all of the other reviewers on this site watched the same "After Fall, Winter" that I did. All of these stars and all of these gushing reviews feel like deck-stacking on the part of the filmmaker and his friends, and this phenomenon seems to follow Eric Schaeffer wherever he goes. He is like a male Bebe Buell in that regard. This particular group of reviews reeks of this tactic; all of them rave extensively over the movie but reveal no plot points and devote most of their text to praising Mr. Schaeffer.

I rented this movie because I'm a BDSM person, and on that level this picture is profoundly insulting. Without revealing any specific plot points, I will only remark that as a long-term dominatrix, I was deeply offended by the implication that one of my fellow older pros would ever, ever refer a client to a fellow practitioner with whom she felt he would not be safe, no matter how much he begged to be referred to such a person.

Another thing that leads me to suspect that these reviews are ringers is that none of them specifically praise the only person who seemed to be trying to bring this often-implausible script to sincere life - the lead actress, Lizzie Brochere. The only pleasure I was able to derive from this depressing, insulting film occurred when she was on screen. I feel like she really tried to make a decent movie that would be watchable for people other than Eric Schaeffer's friends but was subverted from that end time and time again by Mr. Schaeffer's colossal overestimation of his own ability to arouse sympathy and interest.

If Fall was a romantic exploration of a love was that was not meant to be, this sequel from filmmaker/actor Schaeffer is a deeper and darker trip down the rabbit hole that may leave you thinking, in the words of The Who, "love ain't for keeping". Schaeffer takes his own character forward in time where we see him living in dejected squalor. Hope comes in the form of an invitation from friends to travel to Paris France where he once again finds love with an unlikely mate. From there, Schaeffer finds truth, humor, pain and passion by digging deep into the psychology and sexuality of his characters. It's a stunning, masterful film and one that will be with me and even haunt me for a long time.

This is another take on "Romeo and Juliet". Prokofiev did it as ballet. Bernstein did it as musical. Zeffirelli and Luhrmann did it as movies. Tim van Dammen has filmed it as New Zealand rock opera.

Gypsy curse, very Shakespeare. Sharp combinations of alternating poignant tenderness and cynical exploitation, very Globe Theatre. Pixie-faced Lizzie Brochere with the huge eyes, very Juliet. So where are the warring families, the Montagues and Capulets? They are America and France, different ways of seeing life. They are the English language and the French language, different ways of expressing life. And they don't need to be anywhere out there, because they are inside us. From the moment of our conception, from the moment of our birth, we start accumulating individuality and baggage, individuality and baggage that are going to make love impossible - or at the very least, difficult. We are all star-cross'd lovers.

The problem with living more than four hundred years after Romeo first delivered the line: "If I profane with my unworthiest hand..." is how to make a doomed love credible, how to make us the audience care about the lovers and what they feel and what happens to them, and how to make it all look original, how to make it look archetypal but at the same time new. This film succeeds.

Mix the raw emotion and psychological disturbance of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club with a story of romance and love and this is what you get. A Romeo and Juliet for the minds who grew up reading A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while going through their educational careers being numbed by the despair of the writing and music of Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, or Stabbing Westward, to I'm a Barbie Girl and Marilyn Manson. With unemployment and fiscal trouble running rampant and mass shootings on the television daily, this is a story of love that can speak to a generation who may never have known what the words "I love you" meant. This was truly an original film and I will be looking out for this writer in the future.

"After Fall, Winter" asks challenging questions about the connection between our traumatic pasts and present, and the coping mechanisms we invent or latch onto. It is deeply interested in pain, in all aspects, and in particular grief.

Once asked, however, the film has absolutely no interest in exploring any further, much less actually offer any answers. More on that later.

Eric Shaeffer has many talents. As a writer, he writes incredibly naturalistic dialog. As a director, not surprisingly, he wrangles incredibly naturalistic performances from his actors. As an actor, he's completely at ease leading by example - he engages his fellow actors by being naturalistic, and *almost* sells himself as how he probably imagines himself to be.

Trouble is, rather than the whole being greater than, or at the very least adding up to, the sum of its parts, you get the distinct sense that if he could relinquish control over at least ONE of those creative endeavours, he might actually be onto something good.

His poor editor. I'm fairly certain he was just two hands and an editing suite. Rather than being allowed to fashion the film in a way that somehow dug deeper into our human condition, or actually imposing a structure that could've made "After Fall, Winter" a much more disciplined, enlarging work, he had to be basically a technician piecing together a reel of how fascinating, interesting, talented, funny, raw, real, honest Eric Shaeffer is.

This is nothing against Eric Shaeffer, not on a personal level nor on any kind of professional-jealousy level. In fact, he was absolutely right in his speech before the NYC premiere at The Quad - it is incredibly difficult to get an indie film shown in the movie theaters these days, and I applaud him tremendously for ignoring the naysayers and the detractors, of which I'm just one more.

But we all have to eventually put up, or shut up. Mr Shaeffer, if you're reading, like I said above, you're a talented guy. But you have to realise that you're actually dooming yourself by not trusting others and letting their creative energies influence what you could become. Right now, you're just trapped in your vision of yourself, and you can't see that it's dragging you down.

He says he'll make a part of the "seasonal" series once every 15 years. Perhaps "After Winter, Spring", in 2027, will be the one where an older and wiser Mr. Shaeffer realises this, and unleashes the true, talented dramatist within.