Afterglow (1997)
A comedy of tears…
Genre : Drama, Romance, Comedy
Runtime : 1H 59M
Director : Alan Rudolph
Synopsis
A handyman with marital problems meets a housewife with the same.
After not having seen each other in five years, Chris Terry goes to visit his younger sister Noelle Terry in Montréal. Their lives, both together and apart, have been turbulent ones with something toxic having affected the way they interact with each other.
A documentary about two 'conventional' couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 70s, hoping to pioneer an alternative to divorce and the way people would live in the future.
Jacqueline is a young mother living in 1960s Paris with her disabled son Laurent. Abandoned by her husband, Jacqueline sacrifices everything to care for her son and vows to give Laurent a “normal” life full of happiness. Antoine, is a successful DJ in present day Montreal who seems to have it all: a thriving career, two beautiful daughters, partner Rose, with whom he is passionately in love. However, nothing is perfect and Antoine’s ex-wife Carole remains devastated by their recent separation.
Thanks to his wife Madeleine, a social worker who saved him from the street when he was 17-years-old, Pierre Dalpé has become a prosperous entrepreneur, running a garbage-collection business in the Montreal area. His quiet happiness with his wife and their children changes when he crosses paths with Eve, a teenage drug addict/prostitute who belongs to a street gang. At the risk of destroying everything he’s built up, Pierre decides to make it his mission to help Eve get out of her unhealthy situation before she dies of an overdose, like his sister did. But in doing so, he has to confront his old demons, to Madeleine’s despair, as she feels him slipping farther away from her every day.
Mikio (Masato Sakai) is a married man and works hard for the company where he is employed. Then one day Mikio is diagnosed with depression. Mikio's wife is Haruko (Aoi Miyazaki). They have been married for 5 years. Haruko draws comics for work, but they do not sell well. She mainly relied on Mikio for support. Meanwhile, Haruko did not notice any changes in her husband. She begins to blame herself for not noticing any signs. Mikio's depression derived from his work. His company has been pressing him to quit the company. After Mikio quits his job his condition improves, but the dynamics of their relationship changes.
A man and two women are trying their luck in the red room in the countryside. The older (but therefore not wiser) Fred, freshly divorced as a kisser who still desires his ex, meets the self-confident Lucy, who feels called to explore the soul of men in her novels. She lives with her intimate friend Sibil in a Vorpommern house in the countryside. Fred decides to move from Berlin to the two women and try a ménage-à-trois. They get to know each other and themselves.
By following the lives of five Japanese individuals this documentary explores the problem of depression in Japan and how the marketing of anti-depressant drugs has changed the way the Japanese view depression. Marketing of anti-depressants did not begin in Japan until the late 1990s and prior to this, depression was not widely recognized as a problem by the Japanese public. Since then, use of anti-depressants has sky-rocketed and use of the Japanese word "utsu" to describe depression has become commonplace, having previously been used only by psychiatric professionals.
Walter Pinner is the titular Punch And Judy Man plying his trade in the seaside town of Piltdown. Unhappily married to his social climbing wife, who gets him to perform at the 60th Anniversary celebrations of the town in front of all the local dignitaries, his hatred of snobbery comes to a hilarious head.
In a cold French city where suicide is a common urge, there is a colorful shop, managed for many years by the Tuvache family, where it is very easy to obtain the necessary tools to satisfy the sinister desires of so many depressed citizens.
Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates certain secrets related to her mother, interviewing a group of family members and friends whose reliability varies depending of their implication in the events, which are remembered in different ways; so a trail of questions remains to be answered, because memory is always changing and the discovery of truth often depends on who is telling the tale.
The beautiful and popular movie star Miroslava is depressed tonight. As she prepares her suicide, her entire life is revealed on screen in a disturbing portrait of a lonely woman.
Alma Duval, a middle-aged housewife, trying to hide how much she suffers from her husband's amorous excursions while trying to help her children solve their problems and doing her best to keep her family together as it's slowly falling apart. Meanwhile, daughter Virginia is dumped by her boyfriend because she cannot help him with his career. Her cheating husband's birthday party is approaching and many lines will be crossed after that event.
Rami, a young man who lives with his Lebanese family in Montreal, walks with a debilitating limp. His controlling father, Ziad, insists on making Rami's choices for him. Ziad wants Rami to enroll in business school, but Rami, who is lonely and a bit of a dreamer, doesn't have his heart in it. When a young woman Rami's met online suggests they meet in person, he hatches a plan to pass himself off as Romeo, the businessman persona he assumes online.
A widower, visiting the crypt that holds the body of his wife, is accidentally trapped therein. That night he finds that she seems to have been cataleptic, rather than dead, and frees her from her coffin. Things, of course, are not what they seem.
An aging Hong Kong couple move to Australia with their two youngest sons. They stay with a daughter who has already begun a successful career. Meanwhile their eldest daughter lives in Germany and their eldest son remains in Hong Kong. The film explores the different ways the family members cope with isolation and alienation.
A young girl in 1990s Iceland is caught between the life that took her brother and her own inability to strike out on her own. In her grief, she finds solace in metal and dreams of making her own music.
This is the story of three characters (brothers Tomek and Jacek and their neighbor Magda), each of them is in their own way lonely and alienated. The title character makes herself secluded. Tomek's alienation results from his neurological disease, and Jacek contacts the world mainly via the Internet. This is also a film about love. Love of one brother to the other and of one alienated human being to the other. All together it creates a very universal picture with a Polish entourage.
The chief of an African village, who is called 'Demi Dieu' because after God he is the owner of all the things, already has five wives. But as this is not enough he decides to find himself a sixth wife so that he has one for every day of the week except on Sunday when he uses to relax.
After a rough divorce, Frances, a 35-year-old professor and writer from San Francisco takes a tour of Tuscany at the urgings of her friends. On a whim she buys Bramasole, a run down villa in the Tuscan countryside and begins to piece her life together starting with the villa and finds that life sometimes has unexpected ways of giving her everything she wanted.
Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embarks on a sex and violence-filled journey through an United States of psychos and quickie marts.