After

After started out as a romantic fan-fiction story centered around an innocent college girl having a fling with one of the members of the music group, One Direction.  It then found a life of its own, as it was published into a series of books that I have never heard of, but the poster for this movie promises is a "best-selling worldwide phenomenon".  Now we have a movie, which is a dull and lifeless string of teen drama cliches joined together to create a loose narrative, and characters who are so flat, calling them cardboard would be an insult to perfectly good packing material.

I get that this is supposed to be a wish fulfillment fantasy for teen girls, but are they really taken in by stuff this weak?  I'm going to have to give the original novel the benefit of the doubt, because if it's anything like the film adaptation, it must not take much for young girls to swoon.  What we have here is a story as old as the hills, where a nice young girl falls for the mysterious bad boy, and finds out he's much more sensitive and romantic than he first appears.  The "One Direction" angle has been dropped, and instead we have Tessa (Josephine Langford) as the good girl, and the wonderfully-named Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes) in the role of the dreamy bad boy who speaks with a British accent, has tattoos, wears black all the time, and likes to quote and wax poetic about classic literature.  In other words, he's the kind of "bad boy" you would see on a Disney Channel drama.  The fact that the movie asks us to take him seriously is the first of its many severe miscalculations. 

The movie opens with Tessa arriving at college, with her overly protective mom (Selma Blair), and her longtime boyfriend, Noah (Dylan Arnold), who is still in high school, so Tessa will not have him to protect her from the horrors of college life.  What horrors do I speak of?  Well, the moment Tessa's mom lays eyes on her daughter's new free-spirited lesbian roommate (Khadijha Red Thunder), she's about ready to turn right around and pull her out of school.  Tessa calms her mom down (Noah doesn't seem to care, or rather, is written as being too oblivious to care.), and she begins her new life.  Not long after, she runs into the mysterious and brooding Hardin.  They're obviously meant to repel from each other almost from the second they meet.  He criticizes Tessa's favorite book, Pride and Prejudice, and says he doesn't believe in love.  He wears Ramones T-shirts, while she dresses like a conservative peasant girl in a Disney animated musical.  They clearly have nothing in common.

But then, almost on a whim, Hardin takes Tess to his "secret spot" - a secluded lake where he likes to go swimming.  She joins him, and before long, they are making longing glances at one another, and she is letting him touch her in ways that her boyfriend, Noah, never did or could.  Is it love, or is it simply lust?  Honestly, the way the characters are written, I can't tell.  Besides, the movie is too busy putting the young lovers in non-stop music montage sequences for us to care.  But, Hardin does have a secret, naturally.  He doesn't have a very good relationship with his father (Peter Gallagher), and holds a grudge when his dad decides to get married again.  Again, the movie doesn't create much dramatic weight about this, but then, it doesn't create much weight at all.  This is one of those movies where nothing really ever seems to be at stake, so the audience wonders why they're supposed to care.

I would say that After goes through the motions, but that would require the movie to actually be going somewhere.  This movie is so desperate to create drama, it has to force it into its own storyline.  At one point, Tessa's mom walks in on Hardin and her daughter being intimate in bed, and she immediately shuns the young man, and threatens to cut her daughter off financially unless she breaks up with him.  Never mind the fact that there has been no build up to this, nor has her mom spoken hardly a word to this young man.  She just knows by looking at him that he is trouble, and will hurt Tessa one day.  Characters act like total idiots at every opportunity, or the situations are written so broadly, they come across as farce.  And yet, I'm afraid the filmmakers think they're making a serious-minded drama about young forbidden love here. 

The movie's main selling point to its young female audience is supposed to be the love scenes where Tessa opens sexually to Hardin's "charms", but since the movie is rated PG-13, we don't get very much here.  And since every bit of love making (usually shot in extreme close ups) or romantic interlude is scored to bland pop music, they become scenes that we want to get over with, rather than anticipate.  The title of the movie is supposed to refer to the fact that everything in Tessa's life changed after she met Hardin, but since the sexual tension is never given a chance to rise, it never gets to create any significant meaning.  As for the young lovers themselves, they are essentially cyphers written so broadly that any young girl watching can fantasize themselves being in Tessa's position. 

After is simply the latest in a long line of failed teen romance adaptations that are meant to kick start a film franchise (apparently, there are five books in this series).  So why did the filmmakers play it so bland and safe here?  Better to make a racy movie that young girls can talk about, rather than one that is so blatantly a lifeless attempt at paying tribute to other movies.  If you're not going to be original, at least be sexy.  This movie does neither.

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