After Fall, Winter

Lizzie Brochere was just about perfect. With her excellent command of the English language that sometimes needed subtle correction, to her vulnerability and an inner sadness that made you want to hold and protect her, she was great. I would see anything she was in. Her counterpart, writer/director Schaeffer, was annoying. As a struggling, depressed, overly self-absorbed writer, he apparently had one extremely successful novel and could never achieve the same level of success again. Lizzie relates that she did read his novel and found it wonderful, revealing an intimate, sensitive, honest portrait of the writer. Somehow, the qualities that he exhibited back then were long gone. He was anything but lovable, happy, confident or worthy of this much younger woman's love and admiration. Also, he was broke and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and still had the use of a dozen credit cards. The teenage girl that Lizzie was caring for was also excellent. As for the gypsy woman and her young son, they were very believable to me. If you are depressed or impatient, do not watch this movie, unless you cheer up when you see that other people can be a lot more screwed up than you are.

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.

After Fall, Winter isn't a perfect movie, but the levels it goes to examine relationships at their most delicate hits home with anyone. Schaeffer has an amazing ability to create three dimensional characters who's flaws and problems feel real. To me that is the best of After Fall, Winter - the characters and world created. We don't have heroes with "first world problems," we have people we have seen in our everyday lives, right up there on the screen. The cast did an amazing job at accomplishing this task.

A very impressive character study, I would recommend this film to anyone sick of watching rich people fall in love in NYC and live happily ever after (which I hope is the majority of film lovers).

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.