Afterglow 1997

In Montreal, two unhappily married couples become entangled as their private disappointments collide against the hum of a city that seems to offer both escape and consequences. The first pair centers on Lucky Mann, Nick Nolte, and his wife Phyllis Hart, Julie Christie. Their marriage has been fraying for years, especially after Phyllis reveals that Cassie, their daughter, is not Lucky’s biological child — a truth tied to a past where Phyllis bore Cassie with an actor while Lucky served in the Navy. The couple moved from California to Montreal in a tense bid to find Cassie, yet years of silence persist between them. Phyllis, now haunted by her husband’s infidelities and the recent death of her former co-star Jack Dana, spends time reevaluating her life and mortality, revisiting old films that once defined her. She and Lucky live with a quiet, almost ritualized distance: a tacit agreement to avoid sex, even as Lucky’s cheating with clients’ wives—glimpsed in the open cracks of their marriage—continues beneath the surface.

The second pair revolves around Jeffrey Byron, a corporate executive, and his wife Marianne, who yearn for a different future. Marianne longs for children and affection that Jeffrey, absorbed in his own ego, seems unable to provide. Depression shadows Jeffrey, and he wrestles with looming questions about desire and identity. Marianne, feeling emotionally starved, suggests sexual intimacy to spark life back into their union, but Jeffrey rebuffs her. The plot thickens when Marianne hires a contractor to begin work on a baby-ready room in their condo — the pick falls to Lucky Mann, linking the two troubled households through a practical coincidence. Marianne is immediately drawn to the rugged, older contractor, and that spark ignites an affair, drawing them deeper into a web of secrecy and risk.

As the affair unfolds, Jeffrey encounters Phyllis in a bar, where she has just witnessed Marianne and Lucky on a date. A magnetic pull to older companions and a flickering sense of possibility pull Jeffrey toward Phyllis, and his curiosity about life beyond conventional roles grows stronger. He has already shown a complex attraction to his older secretary Helene, hinting at a restlessness that could redefine his life. Marianne, meanwhile, finds herself irresistibly attracted to the rough-edged Lucky, while Jeffrey contemplates the boundaries of fidelity. The two couples’ trajectories collide when Jeffrey invites Phyllis to a weekend getaway at a resort. Phyllis hesitates, returns to Lucky, and then, driven by a mixture of curiosity and a hunger for meaning, joins Jeffrey. At the resort, they encounter Bernard Ornay, a powerful client, and his mistress Monica Bloom, who also take an interest in Phyllis. Ornay’s flirtation with Phyllis creates a rift with Jeffrey, threatening the thoughline of their liaisons. The weekend spins with near-misses: a potential nighttime tryst that dissolves when Jeffrey ends contact after Phyllis responds flirtatiously to Ornay’s knocks at her door. They depart the resort the following morning, tension already stitching itself into their fates.

When the two couples converge again, the bar of a hotel becomes a crucible for shared history and hidden agendas. A violent clash erupts between Jeffrey and Lucky, each man entangled in loyalties and betrayals that stretch back to older wounds. Marianne and Phyllis retreat together to the Byrons’ apartment, where Marianne drops a bomb: she is pregnant — with Lucky’s baby — unaware that Phyllis is his wife. Phyllis is startled and upset, but she conceals her own shock with a practiced composure. Jeffrey and Marianne reconcile in the glow of their uncertain future, the idea of a child binding them in a fragile bond. Meanwhile, Lucky, in a quieter moment, finds Cassie and restores a thread of connection that had long seemed severed. The reconciliation with Cassie hints at a possibility of rebuilding from fragments.

The story closes by mirroring a fate that befell Phyllis early on: Marianne, too, is poised to raise a child fathered by another man, and she tells her friend Isabel that the father is Jeffrey, not Lucky. She does not reveal this truth to Lucky, echoing Phyllis’s earlier strategy of guarding her own and Cassie’s paternity as a private truth. The final image lingers on Phyllis, in bed and crying, overwhelmed by the knowledge that Marianne will carry Lucky’s child, and by the ache of Cassie’s return home. The film settles on a quiet, bittersweet note where love, duty, and the longing for belonging collide, leaving each character to navigate a future colored by secrets kept and connections renewed.