When was the last time two happy people fell in love? Romance is invariably a reaction to the upheavals of adulthood. Most of us equate love with hope; we don’t embrace it as much as swallow it as an antidote to existence. We employ togetherness as a void-filler: to combat disorder, fight loneliness, compensate for parental neglect, even mend a broken heart. “High-school sweethearts” remain such a revered rarity because of the psychological purity of its participants. Teenagers are too young to be incomplete; most of them aren’t searching for love when they find it.
What’s next?
But perhaps the most difficult language of love is its manifestation as a response to illness. Cinema subconsciously uses physical crisis as an allegory for illness — heroes and heroines procreate when the world is ending in disaster movies, Imtiaz Ali unites them in alien lands where kidnapping or losing a ring amplifies the lifeboat syndrome, and coupling is depicted as an intellectual extension of caregiving. Films seldom acknowledge that relationships conceived from the cement of emergency are inherently tragic. But Hannah Marks and Joey Power’s After Everything (2018) bravely addresses the question first asked by Blue Valentine : What next ? Can feelings exist once the fragility subsides? Can a couple sustain a tomorrow of little nothings after enduring a yesterday of dramatic everythings?
Elliot, a 23-year-old is introduced as a flaky man-child. He whiles away his youth having reckless sex and doing the pizza-videogame-drugs routine with flatmate Nico. Elliott is diagnosed with testicular cancer. Parallely, he meets Mia; she nurses him through his hell and they get married. Most stories end here. But this is only the 40-minute mark for After Everything . Rebirth is a social construct; cheating death carries with it the obligatory pressure of making life worth the pain.
Courtship milestones
What’s remarkable about the film is its understanding of love as an exceedingly direct reaction to calamity. All the love story’s seminal moments occur in sync with the seminal moments of Elliott’s medical journey. We see Elliott visiting the doctor. He suspects the worst. In the very next scene, Elliott chats up a stranger, Mia, in the subway. He is unusually persistent, straining to strike up a conversation with his light eyes. One senses he has started ‘scouting’ for a shoulder to lean on. The more serious his cancer gets, the harder he woos her. He asks Mia out on text before going into an X-ray machine. After being diagnosed, he avoids Nico, an identical drifter, to capture this girl’s selfless company. They first kiss after he breaks the news to his parents. Mia whispers “I love you” moments after shaving his head for chemotherapy. We see a quirky bucket list montage — from smashing pumpkins to triggering a threesome — promptly followed by him popping the question, almost like it were the last entry in his list.
Each doomed action elicits an unequal and needy reaction. In fact, many of the relationship’s milestones are abruptly cut midway through the scene. There is no theatrical afterglow — we don’t even see Mia learning of the surgery’s success — almost as if to suggest that this love isn’t as honest as the two might believe.
Reality bites
And then Elliott survives. The remnants of his experience involve holy vows, which he must honour out of respect for everything they went through. But they soon discover — like Sairat ’s Archi and Parshya, La La Land ’s Sebastian and Mia, and unlike 50/50 ’s cancer-stricken Adam and therapist Catherine — that when you start at infinity, the only way up is down. And that the most important relationship need not bear the burden of being the only one.
Normal, ‘un-desperate’ conversations become awkward. They visibly try to replicate the rescuer-victim dynamic in the way Elliott becomes a bigger slacker, leaving Mia to provide for him. To continue caring for him. Only this time, his condition is self-inflicted. When he coughs blood at one point, you almost hope that his cancer has remitted...so that they require each other again. Paul Thomas Anderson wickedly subverted this oedipal shortcoming of masculinity by fetishising the marriage of love and dependence in Phantom Thread ; Alma not only poisons Woodcock so that he yearns for her affection, he lets her continue, fully aware that their “in sickness and in health” thrives perversely on the sickness.
Sadly for Elliott, the blood is a false alarm. His health holds. The intensity of his ‘everything’ has crippled the dreams of their ‘after’. His crisis might have precipitated the necessity of love, but it’s his calm that exposes the conditional core of companionship. Death created them, but it’s life that infects them. Consequently, Elliott and Mia end up embodying the truth of a terminal modern-day disease: Love, in an era of digital plurality, is more of a time than a person.
