By Phedias Christodoulides
Aftersun, the debut feature film of Charlotte Wells, is currently my favourite 2022 film, though there are 4-5 acclaimed new films that I have yet to watch. It is a semi-autobiographical father-daughter story, built entirely around the two characters and their relationship, and unlike most 2022 films, the characters are well-developed and win you over. Inexplicably, it was snubbed at the Oscars.
(spoilers ahead)
The story is pretty simple if it even qualifies as a story. 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is vacationing with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) at a seaside resort in Turkey. The time is the late 90s, as it becomes evident from the technology of the era and the soundtrack (both diegetic and non-diegetic). We understand quickly that Sophie’s parents are divorced and that Sophie and Calum rarely have time together, meaning that their time together during the holiday is more important for them than it would be for most fathers and daughters. The film mostly consists of showing their relatively non-descript holiday. They hang out at the resort, they swim in the pool, they have chats, Sophie meets some other kids at the resort, and that’s about it on the surface. What matters in this movie is the interaction between Sophie and Calum: what they say to each other, what they choose not to leave unsaid, and how they behave together and apart. I’d say that what they say matters least; what is left unsaid but suggested matters most.
The film is largely shown from Sophie’s perspective, but there is a catch; her perspective is both that of the 11-year-old girl in the resort and that of a now adult Sophie watching scenes from the holiday that she recorded with a camcorder. We become aware of the double perspective from the beginning of the film: it begins with a conversation between the two characters that suddenly freezes and rewinds, indicating that this is footage from the past. We get occasional glimpses of an adult woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) watching the footage, clearly an adult Sophie who is also standing in for Wells. Part of the film consists of such footage, though the majority presumably consists of Sophie’s memories of the holiday. In other words, this is a film shown from a highly subjective perspective. Given that the majority of what we see consists of subjective memories, it is not certain that all that we see actually happened as we see it. The question arises: why is Sophie contemplating this old holiday?
The film gradually shows us why. It becomes clear quite early on that Calum is undergoing some kind of crisis, though he tries to hide it from his daughter. It is unclear what his trouble is; we are shown just enough to know that he has trouble. We gather early on from conversations that he married too young and likely has trouble shouldering the responsibility of having a daughter. He is also in-between jobs and has money problems, though he still buys a carpet for Sophie. We learn also that his parents did not remember his birthday when he was a child, indicating childhood traumas. He is 30 and says he cannot imagine himself getting 40, suggesting a man at the end of his tether. He has a cast on his arm but refuses to explain to Sophie what happened, suggesting a suicide attempt. The cast also functions as a synecdoche for his whole self being fractured. He is likely suffering from some form of depression that he tries to cure with meditation, tai-chi but also alcohol. At one point he goes clubbing and forgets about Sophie, leaving her locked out of their apartment and having to sleep in the lobby. He is largely a sympathetic father though, trying hard to have a happy holiday with his daughter. He pulls pranks and they play games like pool together, and they chat quite a bit. Sophie is old enough to understand that something is wrong, but not old enough to understand why her father is unhappy. Presumably, then, the adult Sophie uses the tapes and her memories to try to understand what was going on with her father at the time. Very likely he committed suicide sometime after; maybe this was their last time together.
What does Sophie see now that she did not see or understand then? By extension, given our identification with Sophie’s perspective, what do we see and understand of the relationship? Like her, we try to make sense of the characters and their relationship from bits and pieces of information; from hints. Memories are fragmentary, disjointed and often unclear, and the film’s editing is fragmentary to reflect the fact that we are immersed in a character’s memories. The camera is handheld and the camcorder footage sometimes fuzzy, evoking the opacity of memories. It is up to the audience to gradually fill in the blanks via the bits, pieces and hints that Wells’ direction allows us. Nothing very important appears to be said and done; what matters are the pauses and hesitations between words, the glances, the blurred images we sometimes see at the corner of a frame.
What Wells is doing is arranging disjointed details from the pair’s interactions to gradually enable us to make sense of them and their relationship. Things are not obvious, but not terribly opaque for a seasoned moviegoer. Early on, Sophie asks her dad, “When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?”. It is the kind of naïve but emotionally challenging question that a kid might ask, unaware of what it carries with it. The movie cuts to the question twice, indicating that this memory is a significant clue. Calum does not answer, but his silence is significant. It is also significant when he insists that his daughter learns self-defence to navigate the world on her own, or when he tells her that she can do anything as she has time in her life, indicating that he feels his time is running out, including his time with Sophie. The camera sometimes shows us the characters during private moments, encouraging us to look for more clues about Calum, but it also provides obstacles for us. When we watch Calum on his own, the camera tends to retreat, and we see him from afar or obstructed by an object, or reflected in a mirror, and so on. For example, one night he steps onto the balcony to smoke, and along with Sophie, we view him through the glass door. Such scenes feel incomplete, another suggestion of foggy memory.
Overall, we get a sense that things are slightly off and that something bad might happen, but it never does. Whatever happened to Calum happened after this trip.
The film is not quite a coming-of-age story for Sophie. She is on the cusp of becoming a teenager, but not there yet. She is old enough to be fascinated by the older kids at the resort and to kiss a boy her age at one point, but she is mostly spending time with her father. Their relationship is front and centre throughout. She is a very curious kid in an endearing way, bombarding her father with questions that he tries to answer as best as he can, but frequently is unable or unwilling to do so. The relationship is clearly loving, affectionate and close, yet there is constantly a sense that there is a distance between them and that they are not quite in sync. This is most evident in the scene where Sophie sings REM’s classic “Losing My Religion” at a hotel karaoke and her dad refuses to join her. The scene is especially endearing due to the fact that Sophie sings very badly but bravely goes through the song, alone, seemingly giving her everything in attempting to reach her father, yet he cannot be reached at that specific moment. She tries hard to make him happy; for example, having managed to eke from him that his parents forgot his birthday, on his 32nd birthday she gets a crowd of tourists to sing to him “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. But “Trying to keep up with you/And I don’t know if I can do it” pretty much sums up the relationship; “the distance in [Calum’s] eyes” cannot quite be overcome. Calum is just out of reach, both for the child and for the adult Sophie. The direction often reflects this: for example, in a conversation in their hotel room, they are shown via their reflections in the room’s TV screen and mirror, i.e., separated.
I suspect one reason the film moved me is that I could identify with both characters. I’m the same age as Calum and I cannot see myself reaching forty, though for different reasons than he. I belong to Sophie’s generation, growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I miss how innocent the world seemed to be then, at least to a child. Aftersun evokes this innocence through young Sophie and her perspective. We are shown the sun of childhood, but we are now after this sun: Aftersun. Aftersun is a lotion used after sunburn to avoid peeling; in the context of the film, it stands for the attempt to soothe ourselves about the past by going over our memories.
Aftersun conveys very well two of the most fundamental aspects of human life: on the one hand, life’s transience, and on the other, life’s immediate vibrancy in the present. With regard to transience, the sense of time’s inescapable passing hangs over the whole film. It is there present very literally in the sense that all vacations are finite, and hence, that what we are watching is heading towards an inevitable end, the parting of Sophie and Calum that we see at the film’s finale. The escapism of a holiday is usually short-lived, which provides an undertow of melancholy to even the best of vacations. Scenes in Aftersun often end in protracted pauses that make you feel the passage of time and express a desire to preserve and extend the scene into infinity. It is what the movie is partly about: the desire to overcome life’s transcience.
The transience is also there thematically: Sophie is on the cusp of adolescence, and Calum feels his time running out. Calum is likely aware that his holidays together with his daughter are running out, either due to his personal troubles or due to the eventuality of Sophie growing into a teenager who won’t want to hang out with their parents any longer. And when Calum says, “There’s this feeling, once you leave where you’re from, that you don’t really belong there again,” he expresses what the adult Sophie is experiencing watching the tapes, namely, that you cannot go back or repeat the past. This is the best scene in the film as it is underscored by one of the greatest songs of the 90s, Blur’s “Tender”, the perfect theme song for the film as it is a film full of tenderness. Childhood appears to all of us in hindsight as a golden era we are nostalgic about due to the comfort and security we felt we had under our parents.
With regard to life’s vibrancy, Aftersun overflows with liveliness and wonder. The fragmentary small moments that make up the film such as the badly-sung Karaoke song are successful in transporting us back to the film’s era due to their sensuality and naturalness. The characters and the details around them appear real; what makes them more real is precisely their ordinary, trifling nature. They are not momentous events of the kind found in Hollywood films, but the moments making up most of our actual lives: our meals, our intimate conversations, the laughter after a certain prank, etc. They are Dickens’ “trifles [that] make up the sum of life” and the film makes them seem worth living for. Letting such ordinary scenes go on with little to no plot element brings the film’s visual and aural elements onto focus, closer to us. Aftersun is moreover saying that humanity is ultimately worth getting to know and passing time with, in contrast to the cynical meanness dominant in many contemporary films such as Triangle of Sadness and Decision to Leave.
Interspersed throughout the film are short fragments of rave sequences set in a dark, strobe-lit room where Calum is seen dancing with abandon. A woman, presumably the adult Sophie, appears to be watching him from a distance. It is hard to make sense of what is going on in these sequences due to the darkness, reflecting Sophie’s and ours lack of clarity about Calum’s predicament. In the film’s final sequence, the two manage to embrace as tightly as possible and dance together, the camera cutting back and forth from this scene to their final night at the hotel, where Calum overcomes Sophie’s resistance to dance with him. The two superimposed scenes are united by the same song playing in both, Under Pressure, whose lyrics encapsulate the tension between love and modern life’s intense pressure. The adult pair agonizingly loses contact as the song and scene fade to black. The film then concludes with Calum’s farewell to Sophie at the airport, shot on the camcorder, and a final pan of the adult Sophie holding the camera.
The aforementioned superimposition at the end clarifies the significance of these sequences: they cannot of course have happened but they express metaphorically the meaning of the film, that we live in limbo between the impossible desire to return to the past and the impossibility of leaving it fully behind. As IndieWire aptly put it: Aftersun “shudder[s] with the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place.” We usually do not fully appreciate and miss what we have until it recedes into the past, and then we cling to its memory. The film gradually and cumulatively builds to this realization. Its lack of a proper closure also drives home the impossibility of closure in relationships. However we might try, goodbyes are always imperfect and painful. And finally, it is also suggested that however we might try, we might never fully comprehend our dearest loved ones. Yet try we must.
Aftersun is playing at Rialto Theatre, Limassol on Saturday 22/04 (8 pm) and Zena Palace, Nicosia on Friday 28/04 (10 pm) in the framework of the Cyprus Film Days festival.
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