Set in Germany in the post-World War Two period, The Aftermath is a drama film directed by James Kent. Keira Knightley plays Rachael Morgan, a British woman who travels from London to Hamburg to reunite with her husband Lewis, a colonel stationed there to help rebuild the city. Knightley has featured in a number of period dramas set during the war, Atonement and The Imitation Game among them. In an interview, she explained that the script of The Aftermath caught her attention as the consequences of the war are still so deeply felt.
Keira Knightley (English accent): I’ve been in a number of World War Two films and have seen many World War Two films [but] I’ve never seen a film that was dealing exactly with this period of time, which was the direct aftermath after the conflict. You literally walk around London and you see the scars of it absolutely everywhere. My grandfathers fought in the Second World War so I grew up with stories of that time period. It’s still very present. I think that’s probably why I like revisiting it.
GOMORRAH
Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, was bombed on an unprecedented scale by the Allies. Over a week in late July 1943, some 35,000 civilians were killed, 125,000 wounded and the city virtually destroyed, as dry warm weather turned it into a furnace. So devastating were the bombings that they were known as Operation Gomorrah, after the biblical city that was wiped out. As Knightley explained, rebuilding after the war must have been a colossal task.
Based on the 2013 novel by Welsh author Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath, directed by James Kent, is a British drama film starring Keira Knightley, Jason Clarke and Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård. Set in Germany after the Second World War, it is a story of forgiveness, reconstruction and recovery. Grieving British woman Rachael Morgan arrives in Hamburg in the wintertime to meet up with her husband, a British soldier stationed there to help rebuild a city almost completely destroyed by the Allied bombings. To Rachael’s discomfort the couple must share a house with German architect Stefan Lubert and his troubled teenage daughter Freda. Yet while Rachael struggles to bond with her husband, she and Stefan become increasingly close as he too has suffered a terrible personal loss. When their relationship develops, Rachael must make a decision that is to have a profound impact on the rest of her life.
Keira Knightley: It was post-apocalyptic. How exactly you’d rebuild after that? How physically did you rebuild cities? How did you rebuild nations? And relationships…? There wasn’t anybody on either side of that conflict that wasn’t touched personally by having lost somebody and therefore there were no winners. How did people manage to move forward? It was a question that actually I’d never really thought about. I realised that actually that generation, their great triumph was, in fact, the rebuilding after that horrific conflict.
NO WORD
Knightley plays a woman whose son has been killed in the Blitz, the German bombing campaign that destroyed a third of London. She spoke about the research she did into grief.
Keira Knightley: I’m not a journalist and I didn’t want to encroach in [on] anybody’s pain… so I read things online about grief and different ways that men and women grieved, and there was one thing that stuck out, which is that there’s no word for a parent who’s lost a child. If you’re a child that’s lost a parent, you’re an orphan. Or you’re a widow or you’re a widower… It’s such a terrible thing that there isn’t even a word in our language that can cover it. And that idea of somebody that no longer knows what she is. Is she still a mother if she’s lost her child? What function does she have?
GROWN-UP LOVE
The Aftermath is as much about reconciliation as it is about the reconstruction of a city. It offers a mature look at the complex relationship between love and trauma, as Knightley explained.
Keira Knightley: I think it’s a very grown-up film. I think it’s a very grown-up love story and I think it’s grappling with lots of questions that seem relevant today. How do we rebuild? How do we see each other as human beings? How do we bridge gulfs?
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY - THE SOCIAL REBEL
British actor Keira Knightley excels in playing pioneering women. Some of her best roles are based on historical characters, including 18th-century English aristocrat the Duchess of Devonshire in The Duchess, one of the first female psychoanalysts in A Dangerous Method, cryptanalyst Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game and Nobel Prize-nominated author Colette in Colette.
Born in London, Knightley, now thirty-four, played many small roles in TV movies as a young adult. In 1999 she featured in the science fiction blockbuster Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and then played the daughter of Robin Hood in Princess of Thieves. Her breakthrough role was in the comedy Bend It Like Beckham. This modest British film about aspiring female footballers was to prove a surprise hit in the UK and the US.
Knightley was then cast41 in the American fantasy film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, one of the highest grossing productions of 2003. She reprised the role twice in sequels Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, adding to her adventurous repertoire. In 2005, a busy year for Knightley, she struck gold with her lead in Pride & Prejudice, a British period drama based on Jane Austen’s novel. Her performance was nominated for an Academy Award. She subsequently received much praise for her leading role in Atonement, based on a book by Ian McEwan.
Some of Knightley’s more interesting roles were also inspired by literary characters. She performed with Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, and played Anna Karenina in Joe Wright’s creative adaptation of the Tolstoy classic. Knightley has criticised the way that modern women are portrayed in film, preferring historical roles as they tend to be less conventional, she says: “Almost every character I’ve played has tried to break out of that image of femininity.”