Après lui

Following the sudden death of her son Mathieu in a car accident, Camille (Catherine Deneuve) reaches out to his best friend Franck in an attempt to cope with her loss and gain a focus for her pain. However, this initially cathartic relationship soon begins to border on the obsessive, and Camille's family begin to question her state of mind as she devotes more and more time to Franck. While the film hints at a possible sexual relationship between Franck and Mathieu in the opening scenes, sexuality is not the focus here. Instead, director Gaël Morel (À Toute Vitesse, Le Clan) and co-writer Christophe Honoré (Les Chansons d’amour) have put together a beautifully controlled meditation on the suffocating nature of grief, driven by a remarkable performance from Deneuve at the film's centre.
Michael Blyth