If you’re paying attention, Aftersun gives you everything you need to know about its premise in the opening shot. It’s a brief segment of MiniDV footage shot on a ‘90s camcorder by an 11-year-old girl, Sophie, interviewing her father in a hotel room. The lens is fixed on him, tracking his movements as he moves in and out of frame, goofily dancing and a coyly answering her questions as she zooms in. “When you were 11 years old, what did you think you would be doing now?” She giggles. The video freezes, his face caught in a hazy temporal blur that obscures his features. Just barely visible to the right of the frame is the now-adult Sophie, captured in a television’s reflection. She leans forward and rewinds. Everything we watch from this point onwards is a memory, replayed back onto itself, dissected without ever being explicitly defined. It’s a devastatingly poetic exploration of how we piece together the images of those we’ve lost in an effort to understand who they really were.
With the exception of a few brief flashes to the present, the majority of Aftersun takes place on a trip that Sophie (Frankie Corio, in an incredible debut performance) and her father, Calum (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) take to a Turkish resort during holiday. The events that occur are normal, even innocuous. Calum is a loving father but divorced and clearly personally adrift. It’s the eve of his 32nd birthday, and it’s evident that he feels weighed down by the pressures of young fatherhood and his lack of forward momentum in life. An early scene, in which the two play pool doubles with a pair of college-age guys is telling. “What’s your sister’s name?” One of them asks. “Sophie,” Calum answers, “but I’m her dad.” He seems humored but also hurt by the misreading, and Mescal’s vulnerable performance subtly betrays this inner conflict. Sophie, meanwhile, remains mostly unaware of her father’s mounting inner demons. She’s a child of the cusp of growing up, obsessed with getting older, while Callum is afraid of it.
Aftersun is the astonishingly assured directorial debut of Charlotte Wells, a Scottish filmmaker who sourced much of the script from her own autobiographical details. Real memories of her childhood and relationship with her father are filtered into a fictional narrative that condenses various experiences into a single trip. The film’s patient, observant style, which at times recalls the likes of Kelly Reichardt and especially Chantal Akerman, focuses on details that only become central to us in memory. Conversations are captured in physical gestures, a reflection in a mirror, or a static shot of a developing polaroid. Gregory Oke’s cinematography often pans away from characters as they’re speaking to linger on the details of an environment, imbuing these moments with a sense of memory-tinged temporality. Wells understands that it’s often the insignificant details that stick with us, and yet we interrogate these brief flashes for clues that can help us better understand the past. It’s a type of specific filmmaking that can only come from a deeply personal place, and yet she’s found a way to make her story universal. Moments of depression are equally matched by moments of joy, tenderness, and discovery. Not only is the love between Calum and Sophie clear, but also a burgeoning sense of excitement and anticipation for what Sophie’s future has in store for her.
The film also makes excellent use of music. Aside from a decisive and climactic needle drop of David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure” that may make you cry, Aftersun utilizes various other songs from the ‘80s and ‘90s to bring us into the intoxicating haze of reflection. Music is used intimately to underscore the specificity of Sophie’s memories, and how things seem to change without time moving at all. Blur’s “Tender” underscores a scene of bittersweet discovery for Sophie, where elsewhere an early sequence makes sublime use of an awkward performance of Los Del Rio’s “Macarena.” By withholding more than it reveals, Aftersun allows us hang on every word its characters say. We interrogate each scene for details and interpret every action, even if, like the adult Sophie, it leads to no further understanding of a period of her life she’ll never be able to fully reckon with. Corio’s performance perfectly captures the balance of a girl teetering just between childhood and adolescence. She’s a charming presence onscreen, precocious, and yet still childlike in some of her mannerisms. Mescal, meanwhile, is given significantly more to chew on than he was in this year’s God’s Creatures, portraying a character who is more or less a ghost in the present sense. A framing device captures him dancing, visible only in strobe light, to an adult Sophie at a rave. Our perception of him remains incomplete but we ache to know more. Both characters are deeply human and well-realized, a testament to Corio and Mescal’s skill as actors as well as Wells’ intimate direction.
Ultimately, Aftersun encourages revisiting. Even while watching it, I had the urge to see it again, not to solve its unsolvable mysteries, but to relive the gorgeous, textured memories Wells has conjured. Moments like a slow, silent zoom in on Calum as he practices tai chi at night on the hotel room’s porch, a tragically awkward karaoke performance, or one of several beautifully shot underwater sequences. It can be cathartic to cry at a film, especially when those emotions come naturally without much prompting. The man next to me fought back tears throughout most of the second half, and as with many great films, I spent the credits staring silently at the screen, knowing it would be stuck in my head for a while. Treasure these moments, the film seems to be saying. A photograph may bring you back to a moment in your past, but it’s the movement beyond those still frames that will always stick with you. That movement exists forever in the corridors of your mind.
Photo courtesy of A24
The post Aftersun appeared first on Spectrum Culture.