Absence lingers at the wounded heart of Charlotte Wells’ unforgettable debut feature, Aftersun (2022), which picked up the BAFTA Outstanding Debut Award and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival Critic’s Week.
We hear the whirrrrrr of a video camera lens before we set eyes on Normal People star Paul Mescal’s Calum, a young father separated from his partner who has taken his adored and adoring, almost-eleven-year-old daughter Sophie (brilliant newcomer Frankie Corio) on a Turkish holiday. When we catch our first glimpse of him daggy dancing, recorded by Sophie in their shared hotel room, he’s out of focus and silhouetted with his back to the balcony door. Digital glitches fracture the scene.
For all the languorous heat of their hazy summer days reunion – Sophie lives with her mum in Edinburgh, he’s down south – the temperature visibly plummets in the slump of Calum’s shoulders when she asks him what he thought he’d be doing now when he was 11. Why does this innocent aside wound him so? It’s an inscrutably tense moment interrupting familial tenderness that’s almost voyeuristic to bear witness to.
But we are not really then or there.
There’s another unseen presence, an older Sophie reflected in a television’s glare as she watches back what is now a treasured relic. An aching attempt to better understand the father she never fully knew when it’s already too late.
Sophie (Frankie Corio) fans out a deck of cards as she lies back on the cushioned benches of the hotel bar, with Calum (Paul Mescal) beside her. Credit: Sarah Makharine
Digital ghosts
Drawing deep on Wells’ personal experience of losing her father at 16, the liminal and lilting beauty of Aftersun is etched in the imperfect afterimage of this digital ghost. In grasping at what’s already gone, even mighty bonds leave cracks of atomised fragments that cannot be filled, through moments lost in time and doubts never spoken.
Mescal, rightly nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, puts in a remarkable performance that shimmers through these gaps like sunlight through palm fronds. Irish, but affecting an admirable Edinburgh accent, his turn is less about Calum’s dialogue and more about the hurt held too-tight inside.
We perceive, through little darting details, that he cannot really afford this holiday and is further wounded when the reality doesn’t quite match up to his hopes. By the double room paid for but unavailable, with him forced to sleep in a cot by his daughter’s side. The clamorous rattle of adjacent construction work and nebulous business plans made with a best friend. An unkind jab when he won’t join Sophie’s discordant chorus of R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’, one of many ‘90s hits placing the moment. He offers, a touch cruelly, to pay for singing lessons and she snaps back that he doesn’t have the money.
Calum (Paul Mescal) with Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a boat. Credit: Sarah Makharine
One perfect shot amongst many in the film sees Sophie perched knees up on the bed, haloed in the amber glow from the window. Her back is to Calum as he crumples in the steely cold blue of the bathroom next door, having failed to remove the cast on his broken arm with nail scissors, nicking himself in the process. A split screen that isn’t, they are both there and not. We need no words to discern that his is a soul drifting away just as her ship sets sail.
State of independence
These adroitly drawn details echo through time, paired with the slowing strings and solo horns of Massive Attack cellist Oliver Coates’s subtly unmooring score. Calum watches Sophie in the eerie blue viewscreen of their video recorder late at night as she sleeps. Much later, she observes him in the very same footage.
There’s the womb-like space of the hand-woven rug store where he hankers after a tapestry rich in symbolic meaning that he returns to buy despite their dwindling budget, and an older Sophie’s feet resting on it in the dead of night many moons later, feeling the pang of communion and dislocation.
Corio’s luminous turn is all the more remarkable for Aftersun being her screen debut, conveying both the naivety of Sophie’s youth, asking why her father still tells her mother he loves her on the phone, and also her disarming perceptiveness, flourishing in the company of teenagers by the pool, embracing her gradually unfurling independence. Kissing a boy she thrashes at the resort’s fake motorbike-driven arcade game, then figuring her way back to the hotel room as her father wades into the crashing waves of a midnight escape.
Wrought from the threads of familial complexity, much like the rug that passes from father to daughter, Aftersun will surely stand the test of time, a testimony to the power of relationships across eternity's impasse.
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Aftersun
