After Love

The French title — L’economie du couple — catches the social relevance of the film better than the English version, which narrows to the couple’s emotional state.

A divorcing couple is forced by finances to live together. This may be the most harrowing treatment of a crumbling marriage since Bergman’s TV series and film, Scenes from a Marriage. The film opens in the heat of the couple’s hatred. We fill in the background as the drama proceeds. It ends with the cold impersonal voice of a notary spelling out the terms of their final settlement. 

The incompatibility is apparent. Marie has a job and for years has been carrying Boris, who is a capable builder/renovator but lacks self-discipline. Marie’s mistake was to confuse desire with love. That’s what leads to their one-night stand here, which fails to resolve the couple’s tensions and antagonism. 

Now their anger prevents each from understanding the other’s position. The crux is economic: Boris can’t afford to move out and Marie won’t give him the half share of their apartment’s selling price he demands. 

The split ramifies beyond the family. Boris disrupts her dinner party with some mutual friends and bristles at a possible “suitor.” He manipulates her mother into hiring him for a repair job against Marie’s wishes. 

But the twin daughters become their principal battleground. Because Boris keeps forgetting to buy the one girl’s soccer boots, Marie finally buys them. When they’re “lost” at their first game, Boris buys a replacement. Boris resents Marie’s limits on his access to the girls, Marie the mishaps that occur in his care.

But there’s another issue: class. This is what gives the film a broader scope than marital emotions turned martial. Rugged Boris is working class; Marie was born wealthy and elegant. Her social and economic advantage persists to the end. Even after reluctantly giving him half their home’s selling price, she still will have the money from her father’s bequest, her childhood home that Boris has been hired to repair. 

That makes this psychological study of a splitting couple a reflection of a society — Belgium, France, Europe — that in this century remains as frozen and fragmented by a harsh class structure as it was two hundred years ago. The story of a breaking couple exposes a hatefully fractured social structure. That makes the English title ironic. There probably never was "love" in this relationship: only desire. When that faded the couple had nothing left to counteract their social and economic fissure.