Review: Afterglow (1997)

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Afterglow

Rating

Director

Alan Rudolph

Screenplay

Alan Rudolph

Length

1h 59m

Starring

Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Jay Underwood, Domini Blythe, Yves Corbell, Alan Fawcett, Michèle-Barbara Pelletier, France Castel, Genevieve Bissonnette, Claudia Besso

MPAA Rating

Basic Plot

An ex-B-movie star. Her fix-it husband. A young businessman. His baby-wanting wife. They come together in one of the few love quadrangles in memory.

Review

Julie Christie plays an aging former B-movie star, Phyllis ‘Phyl’ Mann. Her life has been very traumatic including the loss of her daughter Cassie many years earlier.

Nick Nolte is Lucky, her husband and the man she never gets to sleep with. He spends most of his time doing ‘fix-it’ jobs for female clients and providing extra services for those who want them.

Jonny Lee Miller is Jeffrey Byron. His life is looking up as he is one of the movers-and-shakers of the business he works for. He has two brief sexual thoughts about his secretary, Helene Pelletier (Domini Blythe), while the man in the office across the hall, Donald Duncan (Jay Underwood), has a few sexual thoughts about him.

Lara Flynn Boyle is Marianne, Jeffrey’s wife. She wants to have a baby, but Jeffrey does not. She’s hit her fertile period and is desparate to have a child. Enter Lucky and all four characters start inter-mingling in one way or another.

Overallre are some brilliant pieces of cinematography. There was a lot of editing that should have been done. While the entire sequence with Duncan is interesting and create some funny moments, it could have easily been left out. It had no real point to the film.

Christie gives the only shining performance in the film rest are merely window dressing.

Afterglow, while occasionally an entertaining movie, focuses too much on sex and not enough on character.