18/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Anthony Lapia’s super-energetic debut feature film, no less tinged with generational melancholy, fully immerses viewers in an underground rave

It’s night-time, the walls are covered in graffiti, puddles accumulate in a disused, underground car park, and a beat thumps endlessly in the distance, which the camera moves closer to, until it becomes ear-splittingly loud and the underground location of a frenetic rave opens up to us. For over six minutes, an ecstatic crowd of sixty or so faces filmed close-up on the dancefloor sways in an irresistibly kaleidoscopic wave, as physically close as possible to one another, at the height of the music’s force.

This is the full-throttle way that After [+see also:
trailer
interview: Anthony Lapia
film profile] begins. Presented in the 73rd Berlinale’s Panorama line-up, French director Anthony Lapia’s first minimalist and radical film catapults viewers into the position of participants in this euphoria, this intoxicated mass of revellers whose unbridled bodies and minds fall under the influence of chemicals, this community chatting fleetingly at the bar and in the smoking area, escaping into a space-time continuum and packing themselves into one place and one night in a feverish attempt to free themselves from the shackles of the outside world (the barriers of social classes and conventions, individual and collective futures in a world with echoes of chaos). But it’s nonetheless ephemeral ("sorry, I can’t leave my mate with a bloke she doesn’t know"), self-destructive and annihilatory in nature, because there’s an after, an elsewhere, a melancholy reality which the dawn inevitably dredges back up to the surface.

This "after" takes shape by way of Félicie (Louise Chevillotte) and Saïd (Majd Mastoura). The former is a criminal defence lawyer, the latter an Uber driver. They meet on the dancefloor, they like one another and they extricate themselves from the party in the course of the night to go back to Felicie’s apartment. Here, they mostly talk, a reflection of this generation who are hooked up to a drip of noise and caught at the crossroads between capitulation ("it’s always the same, people are off their faces, your mates make idiots of themselves, you have to manage them", "you meet loads of people you have loads in common with, but you don’t remember anything. The energy you’re talking about is too volatile, it doesn’t exist", "there’s no point fighting because we’re already beaten, "humans are inherently bad, we tend to take the easy route; in other words, the worst. Look at our progress: humankind has never been so rich and advanced, but we destroy everything we touch") and fragments of revolutionary hope ("when you’re loving the same thing with other people, something happens, you’re ultra-powerful, you’re not alone"). It’s a discussion which is existentialist, ecological and political (drowned or resisting from the inside?), and which ends in a tender embrace, while the party thumps on before the livid day rises in central Paris to the sound of a rebellion shaking the cobbles.

Swinging between especially well-executed documentary-style recordings (of the party), which are as electrifying as the tracks remixed by Panzer, and a fictional counterpoint underscored by ideology and the feelings of modern-day Parisians gleaned at a totally different pace, After reveals itself to be a winning film-experience on account of its naturalist modesty which evades traditional narration without overplaying it. It’s an interspace which has its own charm, an underground which has its own codes, and a generation who have their doubts…

After is produced by Société Acéphale (who are also managing international sales) and Salt for Sugar Films, in co-production with Les films de l’autre cougar and Les productions du Mont Pelat.

(Translated from French)