Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Charlotte Wells
Starring: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson Hall
Writer/director Charlotte Wells' feature debut
Aftersun is a nostalgia piece set in the late 1990s with a
soundtrack of the pop hits of the era. But it's not cheaply nostalgic.
It's not about our fond memories of cultural ephemera, but rather a more
human variety of nostalgia, our remembrance of people, our regrets over
how we interacted with those we loved, our questioning if we could have
helped, if we could have been better children to our parents.
Digging out an old camcorder, thirtysomething Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looks back at a summer holiday she spent as an 11-year-old (played by
first time actress Frankie Corio) with her 30-year-old father
Calum (Paul Mescal). On the cusp of puberty and the desire for
independence that follows, it was probably the last time she would have
wanted to spend a holiday with a parent, and while it's never made
literal, it's heavy implied that this was the last time the father and
daughter were together.
The film is interspersed with surreal dream sequences in which the
adult Sophie is at a purgatorial, strobe-lit rave. As the light flashes
she catches glimpses of her father in the distance, dancing with what
seems like a forced exuberance. Tellingly, the father she sees in her
dreams is still a young man.
The bulk of the movie simply lets us hang out with Sophie and Calum on
that holiday, and it wouldn't take much editing to fool us into thinking
this was just a regular fun time enjoyed by a man and his loving
daughter. But Wells teases out details that all is not well with Calum.
Some of these details are noticed by the young Sophie, even if she can't
quite process them. She knows, for example, that her father struggles
financially (they're staying in a crumbling hotel but spend their days
pretending to be guests at a more upmarket hotel across the street,
skipping out on bills), but she's too young to understand that when an
adult struggles with money they struggle with life itself. She's mostly
sympathetic to her father's plight, apologising when she loses an
expensive scuba mask, but also unwittingly cruel, dismissing her
father's suggestion of treating her to singing lessons. "Don’t promise
things you can't pay for," she tells him with the coldness of a child
who doesn't understand how easily grown-ups can be hurt by words.
Calum makes other promises that he probably can't keep, and they have
nothing to do with money. At one point he reassures Sophie that as she
grows older she can talk to him about anything. In the moment the two
are more together than they've been at any point in the movie, but it's
the film's saddest scene because we've figured out that he won’t be able
to make good on his promise.
Half of the movie plays like a coming-of-age drama as we spend time
with Sophie watching the world around her with the sort of curiosity we
lose the bandwidth for once we reach adulthood. She has a very honestly
awkward romance with an English boy her own age, detailed through a
flirting procedure that involves the two playing an arcade game. Hanging
out with a group of teens, she overhears sexually explicit conversations
that she probably doesn't understand but really wishes she did. She
enjoys drinking a little too much soda and eating a little too much ice
cream.
While Sophie is having the summer of her life, her father is struggling
to hold it together. There are scenes that focus on Calum in his
daughter's absence, which prompts us to ask if they're imagined by the
adult Sophie trying to figure out what her father was going through, or
if they're truths presented by the all-seeing God of cinema. Early on we
watch as Calum puts Sophie to bed and sneaks out onto the balcony for a
smoke; he dances in a manner that comes off as unsettling, like an alien
trying to imitate their idea of a human having a good time. At various
points we see him slumped in chairs and against piles of rugs, as though
he's desperately struggling to stay awake, or alive.
Seeing the young Mescal play a father is initially striking, as he's
only just emerged from playing a schoolboy in his breakout role in the
hit Irish TV show Normal People. While it's difficult to buy him as a 30-year-old, it's an inspired
piece of casting as it adds to the sense that Calum has had the
responsibility of taking care of another person sprung on him long
before he's been able to take care of himself. Corio is a revelation, a
proper child actor who can convince as a smart kid rather than the
miniature adults so many of her peers come off as. Wells taps into how
effective her young star's expressive eyes are, with Sophie spending a
lot of time looking and observing without always taking things in.
Sophie is a smart kid, but the key word is "kid," and she doesn't quite
have things sussed as much as she thinks. The glimpses we get of the
adult Sophie similarly suggest that she's a smart adult who hasn't quite
figured things out. We may even be led to a dark reading of the text
that suggests she's destined to follow her father.
Mescal and Corio have such a wonderful and believable chemistry that
it's easy to forget they're being filmed. But Aftersun is
the work of a new master filmmaker, an instant expert in pure cinema.
Her leads do a lot of talking, but they rarely say anything, as Wells
tells her story through images. I can't think of many other movies in
which the leading man's face is obscured as much as Mescal's is here.
Calum often wanders out of shot, the camera refusing to follow him as
though it knows he needs some alone time. In key moments the camera
remains behind him as he lets out some unseen emotions. When we see his
face in close-up it's often masquerading as a happy, together person for
someone else's benefit, be it his daughter, other tourists or various
hotel workers. Conversely, the camera is almost always on Sophie's face.
The film knows who Sophie was at this point, but it can't quite nail
down her father. Try to think of yourself and your parents when you were
that age and you'll likely have a similar struggle.
In this age of films shoving their half-formed themes down our throats,
of characters explicitly telling us what we're watching, Wells' debut is
a refreshing, invigorating, unsettling and profoundly sad piece of
filmmaking. Wells never has to tell us what we're watching because
everything she shows us fills in another piece of a tragic jigsaw.
Nothing is more satisfying than a movie that lets the audience do the
thinking, one that allows us to bring part of ourselves to the story.
For 95 minutes or so we're in a cheap Turkish resort with two people we
grow to care for, but we're also back in our own childhoods, or maybe in
our imagined futures or our all too real present. Regardless, we're all
alive. If there's one over-arching message to take from
Aftersun it's that you shouldn't be afraid to do something
that makes you feel silly in the moment, because you may feel something
a lot worse later.
