I recently saw "The Aftermath" with Keira Knightley, another infidelity-themed movie. Keira plays the wife of a British military officer dispatched to Hamburg in the wake of the German surrender of WWII to help "establish order" in the city. Hamburg was of course the site of massive firebombing shortly before the war's end, and thus much of the city was in rubble in the film, with citizens digging through the rubble seeking, among other things, remains of loved ones, in the cold of winter.
The British army has requisitioned a large mansion in the country for occupancy by the officer and his wife. The mansion is the property of a German man, an architect, who lives there with his daughter.
We learn during the course of the film that his wife was killed in the firebombing. We also learn that the son of the British officer and the Keira Knightley character was killed a year or so earlier, in London, by a German bomb, probably a V-1 "buzz bomb".
The officer and his wife have tension between them dating back to the death of the son. He quietly seethes with what she incorrectly perceives to be anger, which she also incorrectly believes is based in his belief that she was irresponsible in letting the son be in the area that was bombed and therefore responsible for the son's death. She in turn is angry at him because she believes he was not "there" emotionally with/for her in the wake of the son's death, and because she believes that, to punish her, he has immersed himself into his military work, making himself unavailable to her.
The home owner and his daughter are permitted to reside in the attic of the manse while it is being used for British officer housing. The British officer is often away in various distant locations doing war stuff. The homeowner is an architect, brutally handsome, sensitive, cultured, artistic. Naturally he and the Keira Knightley character end up swapping bodilies and such.
Eventually it comes to a head. She decides to leave her husband for the kraut AP. They're going to his country place in the Alps (I forgot to mention that he is also independently wealthy). Just as she is saying "goodbye" to her husband, we see that he is truly and deeply hurt, and he says parting words to her that are beautiful and sincere and reveal the depth of his love for her and his pain over the loss of their son, which does not in any way involve anger nor blame toward her. In her face, we can see her realizing that she was wrong about her BH all along, that he was in fact there for her if she had only tried to reach out and take him rather than push him away.
Spoiler alert: in the end, she does not run off with the Aryan Stallion; rather, she returns to the loving arms of her grieving husband, who welcomes her back unconditionally, with huge orchestral music swelling and heaving in the background, all set against a gorgeous German winter woods-scape.
The first 1/3 of the film is plodding and pedantic, almost as bad as that awful dreck about Wimbledon in which Scarlett Johansson holds her nose and tries valiantly to pretend she has actual chemistry with the preening, insipid Jonathan Rhys Meyers. The middle 1/3 can't quite figure out whether it wants to be a love story or a cloak-and-dagger story involving a sub-plot about an underground resistance run by remaining Nazis in hiding. The last reel tries to wrap up the infidelity in a neat bow. Very untrue to life.
But the part of the film that I did find interesting, and apropos of this site, was the depiction of how the WW had formulated false beliefs about her BH's perceived anger and resentment toward her, leading her to reach a place in her own mind where she despaired, felt hated and unloved, sought out a refuge. In the end, the film shows us that her belief on this point was completely wrong, a product of her own neuroses and insecurity. As to that part, I did find the film to reflect the reality that we see in many WW threads here on SI.
[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 3:20 PM, September 22nd (Sunday)]
