After Love, Aleem Khan (director), 2021 Supernova, Harry Macqueen (director), 2021

Love, loss, betrayal, and identity—universal themes and yet, as every couple and family therapist knows, infinitely varied in the particularities and peculiarities of how they manifest in individual lives. These themes weave through two films released in 2021: After Love by English-Pakistani film maker Aleem Khan, and Supernova by English actor, writer, and director, Harry Macqueen. Both films feature committed and loving couple relationships. One is an English-Pakistani marriage of several decades, the other an established gay relationship between two mid-to-later-life men, one quintessentially English, the other American.

After Love opens to sudden loss as the main character's husband drops dead. By contrast Supernova centres on a couple engaged in a prolonged goodbye as Sam (Colin Firth), an accomplished pianist, and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a novelist, set out in their camper van for what will be their last road trip together. Tusker has early-onset dementia, a fast-rising tide that engulfs, and will destroy his personality and identity before it finally robs him of his life. Sam

and Tusker's relationship as they have known it, is being taken by stealth, whilst they are sentenced to go on living in full knowledge of what lies ahead. Sam tries to pretend this catastrophe is not happening, knowing also that it is. Tusker meanwhile makes a plan: he intends to take his life into his own hands while he can, liberating himself and Sam from unchosen destinies. His final act of self-determination.

The subject is gritty, yet Supernova is short on grit. Striving for significance, psychological complexity is lacking: the shadows and interior lives of the characters are absent, abandoning us to attractive surfaces. Without flaws, both characters are too shiny and then there is Sam's shiny sister, family, and friends, in a picture-book setting, all appropriately sympathetic to Tusker whom they all too predictably adore