My wife and I very much liked this film. So much we have been talking about it off and on ever since watching it a week or so ago. However, I can understand why some viewers find it boring. It offers no exciting twists of plot, no thrilling chase scenes, indeed for long takes hardly any dialogue. Instead, we are introduced to a very attractive and likable loving couple, John and Alice, then almost immediately invited to share Alice's grief when John dies, and then to follow Alice's passage from hopeless devastation to launching a new life for herself.
I think it would be helpful for a viewer choosing whether to watch a film or not, to have some idea of what to expect about how the film works. So here are the basics (my take) I see going on in "Another Forever."
Following an opening pan of a cemetery, which tells us someone important has died, there are two thematically important scenes. In the first, a door is flung open and John and Alice enter their new and as yet unfurnished apartment. The theme announced is "passage," moving from one place to another, starting anew, perhaps making a new life. This kind of image and this theme - travel, passing through doorways, finding one's way through strange places and passageways - is repeated throughout the film. Even the conveyances by which travel is made - planes, cars, boats, bicycles, and at the end even the crunching of Alice's shoes on a gravel road - become thematically significant.
The journey metaphor is almost inevitable. To avoid sinking into utter despair at the loss of a loved one, we must somehow "move on," "get beyond" the pain. But we must not simply forget, simply push away from consciousness that which we treasured but have lost. The other crucial scene at the beginning addresses this aspect of the journey. We see John hanging a picture on a wall. It depicts a woman seen from behind, leaning on and looking out from a windowsill. John tells Alice the picture fascinates him with the notion of making a viewer an "observer of someone observing" something else. This is exactly the position of anyone viewing this film. We observe Alice as she travels from scene to scene, place to place; we don't see (or hear) what her "observations" - that is, thoughts - are, but we do see frequent short flashback scenes as she recalls episodes from her past life with John. The "picturing" metaphor is worked out in the film through John's being a professional photographer, and Alice on her travels having a significant encounter with another photographer.
The title "Another Forever" is something of a puzzle. Do we ever have anything "for ever?" Or do we have only the moment, this moment? Or are those even the right questions? Following - and through the magic of fine cinema vicariously but intensely sharing - in Alice's difficult and beautiful journey, my wife and I had to think again about such questions.
