“Love is blind,” says Jessica in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” speaking of the “pretty follies” that lovers commit. But as Akira Yamamoto shows in his second feature, “After the Fever,” love’s blindness can also lead to consequences that “folly” doesn’t begin to encompass.
The film, which premiered at last year’s Busan International Film Festival, tries to elevate to high drama a woman’s undying obsession with a lover who emptied her bank account and forced her into prostitution. However, it becomes a wearisome trudge through a bleak emotional landscape as the disturbed protagonist moves through her life like a blank-eyed automaton, while the object of her fixation never becomes more than a phantom. What does she see in this guy we only glimpse? He is an illusion that inspires annoyance — and not only with the heroine. Nearly everyone around her becomes unsympathetic, save for the ever-patient psychiatrist played by the always reliable Hana Kino.