Aftersun

Aftersun

At the front of the shot is a sleeping 11-year old girl. Outside on the balcony, her father can be seen through the glass door trying to light a cigarette with his one good hand because of the cast on his right arm. He achieves this and then sways slightly from side to side, arms outwards and up and down in loose approximation of Tai Chi moves, or something.

You can’t quite see what’s happening with him he doesn’t come any closer; there are barriers between us and him but it’s clear that this is a moment of solitude snatched at the end of his day when his child is asleep. The deep breaths of the daughter provide a rhythm for these movements, and there’s something almost creepy about it all: what happens when an 11-year old girl sleeps?

But what is “it,” exactly?

That question hovers like fog around Charlotte Wells’ beguiling debut feature Aftersun, which follows an English father (Paul Mescal) who takes his daughter (Frankie Corio) on holiday to a cheap resort in Turkey; it also hovers around this early sequence, where they’re still getting their bearings. There is something untouchable about Calum (Paul Mescal) maybe because Sophie (Frankie Corio) is a child, and he’s her dad, and she’s just about coming to the age where she’s separating herself and becoming her own person.

There is disquiet in the scene but its source is hard to pin down or even name this is still essentially their holiday time together though occasionally they grate against each other in ways typical of parent-child relationships. Nothing toxically so: no trauma porn here. But shallows do not give up secrets easily anymore than depths do.

The child senses things; sometimes she can put them into words; often she cannot find words for what she senses that more than her father realises. But children are resilient; it is possible to perceive a parent’s existential anxiety and still have a great time making a new friend at the arcade, sometimes at the same moment even. Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and Aftersun knows this. It’s not in the dialogue there isn’t much of it but it’s there in the film’s gentle rhythms, its editorial decisions, Wells’ patient and sensitive approach.

Sophie’s parents are separated; she mainly lives with her mother. Calum talks about getting a new place with her that will have two bedrooms, maybe starting some kind of business involving someone called Keith; he doesn’t sound very convinced himself though. Something has gone wrong for him somewhere along the way. Does he party too much? Did he become a father too young?

There are “clues”, signs that his life hasn’t worked out quite how he’d hoped: books on meditation and Tai Chi that suggest not so much lifelong practices as crutches against panic attacks; worries that sit heavy on his back like rocks, sensed by Sophie who tells him sternly she knows scuba masks are expensive when she loses hers and is sorry.

This takes him aback he thought he had them well under wraps but you can see that Calum loves his daughter nonetheless; they have a little tiff at one point over something or other and later he says sorry to her for how he was just then. He’s a good dad. Together they fizz like opened Coke bottles: comfortable with each other’s energy, intimate and familiar

Sophie’s point of view in “Aftersun” is unmistakable; there are, though, scenes without Sophie present that the perceptive viewer will notice. It is then from the point of view of adult Sophie looking back on this vacation as an adult who is herself a new parent and wondering what her father must have been going through. She knows her own memories of the vacation. But what was going on with him?

Wells interrupts the vacation with surreal dreamlike “rave” sequences, where an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall, who wrote and directed 2016’s “Ma,” which I loved and reviewed for this site) stands on a crowded dance floor and sees her father writhing to the music in strobe light flashes of intermittent lightning.

She wants to get to him, touch him, hold him. Sophie is an adult now. She understands him so much better now. What if she could talk to him? They would still have so much to say to each other. In a sense “Aftersun” is an act of imaginative empathy: Sophie can see now what child Sophie couldn’t.

This one-step-removed vantage point, this slightly distanced stance, gives the film its melancholy melody of an almost elegiac sweetness. In the present moment all is sunshine and laughter: Calum and Sophie eating ice cream together; Calum and Sophie getting mud baths together; Calum swimming with Sophie.

The resort might be cheap but it doesn’t matter because they’re together! Mescal (so wonderful in “Normal People”) gives such a tactile earthy performance grounded in the details that every once in a while we catch a glimpse of worry or self-loathing: his fears about not being good enough; not being able to provide for her or failing her all the things he feels like he needs to hide and mostly does hide.

Frankie Corio is a newcomer. She’s alert, sensitive, and completely natural. The dynamic between Corio and Mescal is nothing short of amazing – they’re so comfortable with each other! They’re playful and thoughtful; they get joy from each other but are capable of hurting each other too. This dynamic is a testament to both Mescal and Corio, of course, but also to Wells’ gifts as both a casting director and an actor’s director.

Cinematographer Gregory Oke uses soft rich palette, summery and saturated, often keeping the frame off center in order to destabilize the point of view. Calum is often seen through a doorway, or as a reflection: in a mirror or on a television screen obscured; half there; half not there similar to adult Sophie’s glimpses of him at the rave: the strobe is so violent that it’s impossible to see him whole; to perceive him there and in the flesh.

Sound designer Jovan Ajder does fine work here too particularly in a scene when Calum stalks down to the beach in the middle of the night for a swim. Calum disappears into blackness that swallows him up while lapping waves gently crescendo into thundering surf.

Wells’ 2015 film, “Tuesday,” can essentially be seen as an early version of “Aftersun.” One evening each week this college student visits her father’s house even though her mother doesn’t seem to like it. The girl doesn’t snoop so much as touch his things his guitar, one of his sweaters. He’s not there. Where is he? Did he forget it was Tuesday? ‘Tuesday’ is a powerful short film about a young person’s longing to know a man who seems beyond reach; in fact, he is within arm’s length and yet far enough away that it might be easier if he weren’t there at all.

I remember the moment I realized not just intellectually but viscerally how young my parents were when they had me. I was looking at a photograph of my dad holding two-year-old me. He was about 26 years old at the time. I looked at his face: its roundness and lightness, the spark in his eyes, the way he gently clutches my hand (so I don’t rip off his glasses). It made time telescope out on both ends for me somehow.

I thought about being 26 myself, how young and insane I was. It still feels impossible to believe that he was that young once too. He was such a good dad. I wish I could ask him things about his life. What did it all feel like for you? Wells’ “Aftersun” does exactly that, only beautifully.

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