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Frankie Curio is extraordinary as young Sophie and Paul Mescal brilliantly depict the complexity of Calum’s character. It is exciting to think of Charlotte Wells’ future endeavors after this promising debut. Which isn’t to say you don’t consider the audience, but consciously trying to cater to other people while using it as a medium of self-expression seems a dangerous path to walk.
'Aftersun’ Review: Drenched with beautiful moments as Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells gives us a glimpse of the ... - Fort Worth Report
'Aftersun’ Review: Drenched with beautiful moments as Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells gives us a glimpse of the ....
Posted: Sun, 06 Nov 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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The distance between the father and the daughter is encapsulated in a rave party where adult Sophie catches glimpses of her father. She walks up to him, but she cannot see him in his entirety. She had a lot to say, indefinite reasons to be angry about, and the aching desire to hold onto her father a little longer. Sophie stood in the dark room, unable to grab hold of her father as she watched him fall.
Life
They were both on set and we see — as the camera pans back to Calum in the shot — at the end of the scene, Frankie would get up from the bed and leave the room with Paul together. They would remain outside the room together and we would reset. Paul had to shift from being in that internal space that allowed him to play that intense scene, back to playfully hanging out with Frankie. To some degree, that reflects what that character had to do in that moment, so it all played into itself. Indeed, Wells’ three short films and “Aftersun” all feature the same precise calibration of tone and internal meanings. Her characters struggle to express their frustrations in a world that boxes them in.
Aftersun
The time they spend on this holiday is very precious to them. Calum takes Sophie on a trip to a Turkish budget resort, where Calum struggles with feelings of depression. The adult Sophie is trying to remember her father by looking back on this holiday, and piece together the memories she has with the help of the videos she and her father took on vacation. Aftersun, now in select theaters and streaming later this year on Mubi, certainly isn’t told in a straightforward manner.
He wanted to become that person for Sophie—someone she could trust with all her secrets, someone who would not judge her and help her make sound decisions. Wells was interested in film from a young age, but did not initially pursue it. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from King's College London and then a Master of Arts from Oxford University. She completed a dual Master of Fine Arts and Master of Business Administration at Tisch School of the Arts and the Stern School.
But yes, tai chi and raving are coping mechanisms for different sides of Calum. Making a feature film, though, meant toiling over every detail, carefully sculpting the film’s precise but organic flow. “I was always preoccupied with keeping a record of things visually,” Wells said, describing how she shot friends and parties, including a last-day-of-school celebration before reluctantly changing schools. Romanski and Jenkins signed on to produce through Pastel, their production company formed with the intention of enabling young directors similar to how Plan B helped them make Moonlight. But I’d also like them to come away knowing that memory is a very powerful thing, and it’s warm. For Calum, it’s something he will never get to look forward to or dread again, because he’s now forever frozen in his early 30s.
“I am interested in exploring the unknowability of ourselves and the people closest to [us],” Wells explained. “I think, even as you grow older, it’s hard to see your parents as people. But they’re still your parents.” Trying to understand anyone, the film posits, is an act of love. When a child tries to understand a parent, it’s the deepest kind of love there is.
The film is sparing in its details, but it implies that this trip was the last time she saw her father. Some of the groundwork for Aftersun was laid in Wells’s 2015 short film Tuesday (she has called this “a sequel of sorts, in a different place and time”). There’s more than a hint of the tactility of Lynne Ramsay’s early works, with short films such as Gasman (1997) and features such as Ratcatcher (1999) clearly serving as inspirations. Throughout the film, we never get to know what exactly Calum was suffering from, but with the bits and pieces shown and discussed, we form a rough idea about the cause of his suffering.
Editing this film was more nerve-wracking than ever
Aftersun builds its tension by allowing the audience to slowly see more and more of Calum’s pain, until we watch him break down crying. He could have died due to some of his self-destructive behavior, or his mental health issues could have gotten so bad that he disappeared, never to be seen again. His fate isn’t confirmed, but this is a film about grief and loss, at least one aspect of it. So whatever has happened to Calum, the loving father from the vacation is gone forever. We then see Calum recording her as she boards a plane back to Edinburgh to be with her mother and return to her life.
Gently poised from the perspective of an older Sophie we only vaguely see, the film is a memory piece. Sophie, teetering between childhood and young adulthood, is attracting the attention of older kids. But we gradually grasp that it’s not Sophie who’s sliding away from her dad.
If we’re lucky to grow up with parents or close guardians, we build our portraits of them first in broad strokes of primary color. They’re defined in relation to us; they’re the most important adults in our still-small world. We stop depending on them; we grow up—maybe even face some of the same challenges they did. And yet, envisioning who they were without us can still be difficult. Another moment from the Jubilee celebrations saw Charlotte encourage her little brother to stop waving as they headed to Horse Guards Parade for Trooping the Colour. Louis was very excited to greet members of the public from their carriage but was interrupted by his elder sister, who pushed his hand down as his excitable waves peaked in speed.
She hates that song, she wouldn’t rehearse it, and I had to sing it to try and encourage her to come onstage for the shot. When I saw Aftersun at the Telluride Film Festival, it was the first nice experience I had watching — and it was very clear that there was no need to watch it, perhaps ever again. (Laughs.) I did do a director’s commentary, which was completely surreal, but I don’t count that as watching so much as reliving what was happening beyond the frame. I’ve been speaking about the film so much that it strangely starts to feel like some abstraction that isn’t real.
Charlotte Wells might have heard me weeping at the premiere of her film. “There was someone behind me crying quite audibly,” says the Scottish director, who was still putting the finishing touches to her feature debut, Aftersun, when it crash-landed at Cannes back in May. She’s been forced to play grief counsellor to scores of traumatised viewers ever since. I have a torso on an hour’s worth of digital video playing chess. All of our heads are framed out of screen because the chess board is more interesting. My generation has more than the generation before, and this current generation record more than ever.
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