The joke of the movie was that while O. stared and wept and mourned for his love from earth, E. was having a terrific time in hell, where she could, finally, stop behaving: stop looking after her querulous mother and her harassed father; stop listening to the whining of the clients she tried to help as a lawyer for the indigent but who never thanked her; stop indulging her self-absorbed friends’ endless patter; stop trying to cheer her sweet but perpetually morose boyfriend. Instead, she was in the underworld, a place where the food was plentiful and where the trees were always sagging with fruit, where she could make catty comments about other people without consequence, a place where she even attracted the attention of Hades himself, who was being played by a large, muscular Italian actor named Rafael.
Life After Death had divided the critics. Some of them loved it: they loved how the film said so much about two different cultures’ fundamentally different approach to life itself (O.’s story was shot by a famous Swedish director in somber grays and blues; E.’s story was told by an Italian director known for his aesthetic exuberance), while at the same time offering glints of gentle self-parody; they loved its tonal shifts; they loved how tenderly, and unexpectedly, it offered solace to the living.
But others had hated it: they thought it jarring in both timbre and palette; they hated its tone of ambivalent satire; they hated the musical number that E. participates in while in hell, even as her poor O. plinks away aboveground on his chilly, spare compositions.
But although the debate over the movie (which practically no one in the States saw, but about which everyone had an opinion) was impassioned, there was unanimity about at least one thing: the two leads, Willem Ragnarsson and Fausta San Filippo, were fantastic, and would go on to have great careers.
Over the years, Life After Death had been reconsidered, and rethought, and reevaluated, and restudied, and by the time Willem was in his mid-forties, the movie had become officially beloved, a favorite among its directors’ oeuvres, a symbol of the kind of collaborative, irreverent, fearless, and yet playful filmmaking that far too few people seemed interested in doing any longer. Willem had been in such a diverse collection of films and plays that he had always been interested in hearing what people named as their favorite, and then reporting his findings back to Willem: the younger male partners and associates at Rosen Pritchard liked the spy movies, for example. The women liked Duets. The temps—many of them actors themselves—liked The Poisoned Apple. JB liked The Unvanquished. Richard liked The Stars Over St. James. Harold and Julia liked The Lacuna Detectives and Uncle Vanya. And film students—who had been the least shy about approaching Willem in restaurants or on the street—invariably liked Life After Death. “It’s some of Donizetti’s best work,” they’d say, confidently, or “It must’ve been amazing to be directed by Bergesson.”
Willem had always been polite. “I agree,” he’d say, and the film student would beam. “It was. It was amazing.”
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Life After Death, and one day in February he steps outside to find that Willem’s thirty-three-year-old face has been plastered across the sides of buildings, on the backs of bus-stop shelters, in Warholian multiples along long stretches of scaffolding. It is a Saturday, and although he has been intending to take a walk, he instead turns around and retreats upstairs, where he lies down in bed again and closes his eyes until he falls asleep once more. On Monday, he sits in the back of the car as Mr. Ahmed drives him up Sixth Avenue, and after he sees the first poster, wheat-pasted onto the window of an empty storefront, he shuts his eyes and keeps them shut until he feels the car stop and hears Mr. Ahmed announce that they are at the office.
Later that week he receives an invitation from MoMA; it seems that Life After Death will be the first to be screened in a weeklong festival in June celebrating Simon Bergesson’s films, and that there will be a panel following the movie at which both of the directors as well as Fausta will be present, and they are hopeful he will attend and—although they know they had extended the offer before—would be thrilled if he might join the panel too and speak about Willem’s experiences during shooting. This stops him: Had they invited him earlier? He supposes they had. But he can’t remember. He can remember very little from the past six months. He looks now at the dates of the festival: June third through June eleventh. He will make plans to be out of town then; he has to be. Willem had shot two other films with Bergesson—they had been friendly. He doesn’t want to have to see more posters with Willem’s face, to read his name in the paper again. He doesn’t want to have to see Bergesson.
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem’s side of the closet, which he still has not emptied. Here are Willem’s shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem’s arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.