Aftersun

Charlotte Wells’s semi-autobiographical debut feature is a memory film that looks back at a Scottish girl on a summer vacation with her father sometime in the 1990s. In the film, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) does her best to have a good time over several days that bleed into each other at a Turkish discount beach resort her 31-year-old dad Calum (Paul Mescal) has booked for them. This place is one they’ve likely gone to before, or they have gone to similar types of places, probably on father-daughter trips that go back as long as Calum has been divorced from Sophie's mom. Calum seems a devoted and loving parent, but Sophie is at the stage of life that straddles childhood innocence and adolescent awareness, so for the first time, she is able to pick up on melancholy emotions and existential aspects of her father that she won't be able to fully process until she's much older.

Though the film seems deliberately, almost maddeningly, opaque, by the end of the picture, the sensory experience we share is crystal clear. We've all had that experience in young adulthood in which we realize we're the same age that our parents were during a key event that's lived in our memory. We attempt to reconsider what that time in our parents' lives must have been like for them now that we can imagine our grown selves in the same situation as someone we formally only saw in relation to our younger selves. Wells more than succeeds in capturing this feeling, although the visual approach she chooses kept me at a distance. Since her protagonist grew up in the '90s, her memories evoke the consumer home video that was widely available in the decade. Indeed, many of her memories are not of the actual events but of later recollections of watching home videos of those events. This experience is much the same for people of my generation who view our childhoods in the 1970s through the prism of faded pictures in old photo albums, silent Super-8 home movies, and the decades-lingering smell of dusty slide projectors.

I must admit that I respond far more to this type of picture when someone of my own vintage makes it. Sofia Coppola, who is one month older than me, made the sublime Somewhere in 2010, which is also about an 11-year-old girl spending time in a hotel with her young father. As in Aftersun, the girl is witness to complex emotions that she's old enough to sense but not mature enough to fully comprehend. Somewhere, shot by the inimitable Harris Savides, evokes this situation with long, static shots of hallways, sparsely furnished rooms, and lingering two-shots in which our eyes are drawn to the character's faces.

The comparison to Somewhere seems intentional, as Wells gives Mescal a cast on his hand, just like Somehwere’s Stephen Dorff. Of course, there are myriad differences between these two films, but the biggest divergence to me is the aesthetic way the memories of a child of the '90s are informed by self-recorded, usually handheld, frequently tight close-ups of camcorder video compared to the way a child of the '70s’ memories recall the briefer, usually silent, often locked-down images of slide photography, Polaroid snapshots, and Super-8 film. The image-capturing technology of that earlier era frequently lacked a reflex lens and thus encouraged amateur photographers to frame their shots unusually wide. My childhood memories are much more about wallpaper, lampshades, clothing, and driveways, with me and the other folks usually depicted as very small in the frame. These proportions and perspectives are the opposite of those of Wells and others of her generation, whose childhood memories often focus on close-ups, even macro details. This difference is evident in the frequent use of Sophie's Hi-8 video recordings in Aftersun and also in the way that most of the film is shot in similarly tight frames that focus on people far more than places.

Wells’ deliberately paced movie seems designed to evoke one's own childhood memories, especially of one’s own parents. Aftersun is not a mystery in which you devote much of the film trying to guess what specifically is going on with the father or speculating on the dynamics between him and his daughter. Instead, it is a picture that washes over you, encouraging your mind to occasionally drift away from what's on-screen and think back to when you were eleven years old, or (for most of us) when you were thirty-one. Thus, Aftersun will probably instill a unique reaction in each viewer, one that will be colored by one’s age, gender, and parental relationships, but I think, even more by the era in which one came of age.