Charlotte Wells (2022)
For starters, a caveat – the reverse of a spoiler alert. I was looking forward to writer-director Charlotte Wells’s highly and widely praised first feature[1] though grateful for BFI’s advance email telling me ‘This film contains a sequence of flashing lights’. A few minutes in, a strobe-lit rave exploded onto the screen and I closed my eyes, relieved to be getting the flashing lights over with so early. It turned out to be just the first of many such sequences (I’d guess nine or ten albeit some are very short). So I’m glad to have seen Aftersun but sorry not to have seen more of it – I must have looked away for several minutes all told. If Wikipedia’s detailed plot synopsis is accurate, I missed significant things happening in the rave bits (all of which are dialogue-free). This note could be as inadequate as BFI’s well-intentioned warning.
The time is the 1990s, the place a budget Turkish coastal resort, where a Scottish father and daughter, Calum (Paul Mescal) and Sophie (Frankie Corio), are on a package holiday. He’s thirty and she’s eleven but Calum passes for younger and they’re sometimes taken to be brother and sister. Sophie lives with her mother, from whom Calum is separated, though a phone call he makes from Turkey suggests he and his ex are on amicable terms. From what we see and Sophie says, she gets on well with both parents and Calum’s clearly happy to be spending time with his daughter. Although he reveals little about his own life, he’s no less clearly unhappy with himself. He’s emotionally up and down but the up seems willed, the down to come naturally. In their hotel room, he reads self-help books and does Tai-chi moves but occasionally lets his sadness show – usually when Sophie’s not there to see but not always. Using their camcorder to ‘interview’ Calum, she asks, ‘When you were eleven, what did you think you would be?’ and gets a grim-faced, troubled silence in reply. As the holiday goes on, Sophie’s increasingly aware that there are things about her father she’s not able to know.
They still enjoy much of their time together – swimming, playing pool, making fun of the tour reps leading a Macarena in the hotel’s entertainments area. Charlotte Wells, who was born and grew up in Edinburgh and is now based in the US, does a fine job of conveying the dazzling, languorous textures of a red-hot holiday as experienced by people who don’t normally see much sun. She captures the peculiar atmosphere – part relaxing, part unsettling – of the resort (the hotel is a semi-building site). As well as feeling a distance from her father, Sophie also begins to see herself in relation to holiday-makers even closer to her own age – teenage girls with romantic ambitions for their stay, pre-adolescent and older boys whose pool-cue skills she more than matches.
Wells uses an imaginative visual language to reflect Sophie’s perspective(s) on Calum. This is well described by Leigh Singer in his Sight & Sound (December 2022) review of Aftersun: ‘The beauty of [cinematographer] Gregory Oke’s tactile, colour-saturated images and often semi-obscured framing is that they express both the young Sophie’s oblivious perspective and her older self’s heightened attempt to (re-)construct a picture of her father that won’t ever fully shift into focus’. I’m not sure ‘oblivious’ is quite right: Sophie seems, rather, curious to understand more about Calum and to intuit she doesn’t know how to. But Singer’s right about the ‘older self’ – a self who is both Sophie and the woman behind the camera. Wells has made clear in interviews that Aftersun is essentially autobiographical retrospection. She gives reality to this dimension of the material by introducing the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who is now herself about thirty, living with a female partner (Sarah Makharine) and their baby. This Sophie isn’t on screen long enough to emerge as an individual in herself but she does register as the director’s alter ego. There are more light-hearted moments with the camcorder than the one mentioned above. The older Sophie watches this primitive footage, still trying, two decades later, to work her father out. We get the feeling he’s no longer around for her to ask in person.
Films that engross without much plot are often less impressive once the film-maker feels an obligation to make things happen. Even when these are plausible you get the sense the director isn’t primarily interested in events. Aftersun comes into this category, during what turns out to be the big evening of the holiday. Sophie has put her and Calum’s names down to do ‘Losing My Religion’ at a karaoke session. When the MC calls out their names Calum’s annoyed; it seems this has become an annual holiday ritual he’s now fed up with. He refuses to go on stage so Sophie goes it alone (and sings lamely). Soon afterwards, Calum suggests they have an early night. Now it’s Sophie’s turn to dig her heels in: she insists on staying downstairs while Calum returns to their room. He has allowed her time on her own before now. Even though this is much later in the day, it’s credible he’d do so again when they’ve just had cross words. But what happens next is too much.
Of course, what happens may not have happened. With the help of the thirtyish Sophie device, Charlotte Wells cleverly blurs the distinction between actual and imagined recollection; it goes without saying that, at one level, Sophie must be inventing what her father got up to in her absence. While eleven-year-old Sophie fends off the attentions of Michael (Brooklyn Toulson), the blatant pre-adolescent boy who’s taken a fancy to her, Calum leaves the hotel room, wanders down to the beach alone and walks into the sea. He disappears into darkness and Wells holds the shot for a long time, strongly implying that Calum has drowned himself. Sophie makes her way back to the hotel room and finds it locked. She goes to reception and falls asleep on a sofa there until the night manager turns up and unlocks the door of her room. Inside, she finds Calum sleeping naked on the bed where she has usually slept. It’s easy enough to accept the beach sequence as the older Sophie’s imagination – her reflection on how depressed her father may have been at the time – but the follow-up is less convincing, as Wells tries to fit the events of the evening into a continuing reality. The next day, Calum says sorry to Sophie for his behaviour but is surprised when she mentions the night manager had to let her back into the hotel room. What did Calum think had happened when he’d gone off with the key? (Why doesn’t Sophie ask him that question?)
Quite early on, Calum mentions to Sophie he’s hoping to get a place in London with a friend called Keith, and that she can visit there. It’s one of the few things he says about his life apart from her and the sole verbal hint that he’s gay (or bisexual). His attitude and tone of voice in a brief conversation with a diving instructor (Onur Eksioglu), during which Calum says he’s surprised to have lived to thirty and that he thinks forty’s a long shot, may also suggest this. If there are other visual clues, though, they come with flashing lights. When Calum says goodbye to Sophie at the airport, where she’ll catch a plane to return home to her mother, she watches him walk away and through swing doors, beyond which strobe glints are glimpsed. The rave sequences in Aftersun seem to represent Calum’s other identity and its inaccessibility to Sophie but any link there may be between his sexuality and his unhappiness remains opaque. As it must – ‘explaining’ the father would contradict the film’s main premise.
In what’s a virtual two-hander, Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio are both excellent. With a Scottish rather than his own Irish accent, Mescal doesn’t speak as naturally as he did so memorably in the TV adaptation of Normal People (or in his small role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter last year) but his physical acting is of a high order. He creates such an emotional rapport with an audience that we don’t need to know exactly what his character’s feeling in order to be held by and believe in him. Mescal is so consistently truthful that he nearly makes sense even of Calum’s morning-after-the-night-before apology. His young co-star is even more remarkable, especially in how she blends Sophie’s perceptiveness and incomprehension. Charlotte Wells’s skilful direction of Frankie Corio, a newcomer to screen acting, stands out among the many strengths of Aftersun.
24 November 2022
[1] Afternote: Its latest accolade, announced in December 2022, is first place in Sight & Sound’s poll for the year’s top 50 films.
