Page 612 - A Little Life: A Novel

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ONE OF THE first movies Willem ever starred in was a project called Life After
Death. The film was a take on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and was
told from alternating perspectives and shot by two different, highly
regarded directors. Willem played O., a young musician in Stockholm
whose girlfriend had just died, and who had begun having delusions that
when he played certain melodies, she would appear beside him. An Italian
actress, Fausta, played E., O.’s deceased girlfriend.

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,