A dazzling debut that unfolds with the gradual pathos of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells' "Aftersun" isn't just an honest movie about how we remember the people we've lost: fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere. , everything at once. it is also a dizzying act of self-remembering. Here, in the span of an oblique but tender story that feels small enough to fit in a snapshot, Wells creates a film that gradually resonates far beyond the frames of it. By the time it reaches its climax with Freddie Mercury's biggest needle drop this side of "Wayne's World," "Aftersun" has begun to shudder with the crushing weight of everything we can't leave behind, and everything we may not have. known for taking with us in the first place.
When Sophie thinks of her father, she thinks of their Turkish vacation together in the late '90s. That was the trip to her 11th birthday, and Calum, played by Paul Mescal, who makes an early leap into father roles with tremendous poise and a sense of paternal mystery, he turned 32. Some children in his rundown hotel I assumed were brothers, and now they would be about the same age.
As an adult we only see glimpses of, Sophie rewatches the MiniDV footage she and Calum shot on that vacation, anxiously scanning the standard definition video for clues a child might have missed. Clues to what? No matter.
Director: Charlotte Wells
Writer: Charlotte Wells
Stars: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall
The eerily objective home videos and semi-imagined 35mm scenes that "Aftersun" wraps around them suggest that Calum was wrestling with a demon of one stripe or another, and that he was doing his best to hide that struggle from his daughter during his time too. weird together, but Wells denies us the details. Like Sophie, all we can do is search the rubble for meaning and hope to fill the haunted spaces between the man she knew and the man she lost.
We tend to think of memories as crystallized moments of time, loose along the trellises of a fallen chandelier somewhere deep in our minds. And yet, personal experience tells us that our past is made up of an endless whirlpool of different sources, real and invented, each one roughly stitched together with the same desperation that our sleeping brains can organize a billion neurons at random. in a semi-coherent dream. .
Some of those fonts are smooth as ghosts and also change shape in the shadows. Others are much harder, as still and tactile as a rug on the floor. Both can be evocative, but neither is enough to connect all the dots; Not when you're trying to retrace someone you loved from the vague silhouette they left behind.
All these years later, a lifetime since the tan she got in Turkey faded back to freckled white, Sophie has only grown more desperate to see what the home videos of that trip will never show her. As if by osmosis, we sense that she is haunted by the feeling that some ineffable part of herself will always remain just out of her reach, like her patch of skin between her bony preteen shoulders where Calum had to apply the protector. solar. We feel that she rewatches the camcorder images in the desperate hope that her father can show them to her in time to save her. And we feel like she does this because she never saw him again.
Wells's clever construction allows “Aftersun” to unfold from a dual perspective that seems to be filtered through the eyes of both an adult and a child at the same time. We search for discrepancies, scanning the screen for answers to questions we don't even know how to ask until even the most banal images in the film seem riddled with secrets. Wells's camera sometimes lingers on her characters during the kind of private moments when they assume no one can see them, as if the film itself is goading us into assuming the worst. Gregory Oke's blurry, tactile cinematography suggests a more sensitive read, its cobwebbed textures reminiscent of Lance Acord's work on a film that often feels like a platonic riff on "Lost in Translation."
Calum has a cast on his arm, but claims that he doesn't remember how he got hurt. He calls Sophie "poppett" and speaks to her daughter with a guarded intimacy that makes it hard to tell if he's trying to keep her safe from the world or protect her from himself. Calum smokes on the balcony of her hotel room after she falls asleep, standing on the other side of a glass door. He sometimes practices tai chi when she is alone in the room, with her body hidden from the camera by the bathroom wall.
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