LAST RESORT
Memories of a daughter’s vacation with her father haunt her present in this poignant drama.
I’m interested in ambiguity and complex emotions,” says filmmaker Charlotte Wells. “I never want to be too obvious. In approaching those things on film, I do tend to leave space for people to bring their own experiences to it. And their experiences tend to lead to different interpretations of what might have happened.”
Aftersun, Wells’ affecting feature debut, is a case in point. Ostensibly the tale of a young dad (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) taking his 11-year-old daughter on a beach holiday in Turkey, it gradually reveals itself to be a meditation on memory, the adult Sophie looking back on her younger self (newcomer Frankie Corio) and the telling signs that should have alerted her to her father’s fragility.
Inspired in part by a holiday Wells took with her own dad when she was 10, the impressionistic film juxtaposes Sophie’s carefree coming-of-age with her father Calum’s internal battles. “A lot of it is drawn from things I remembered from childhood,” Wells admits. “But I think of it more as being emotionally autobiographical. I was aiming for a feeling more than anything else.”
Many of Aftersun’s questions are left unanswered. We never discover what led Calum to separate from Sophie’s mum, or why he has a plaster cast on his right wrist. Even Mescal was kept in the dark, on his own volition. “I think we had one conversation where I gave him my impression of where Calum is going,” Wells explains. “But beyond that I trusted him with the character scene by scene. Paul knew where I was coming from, and he had the freedom to draw from that what he wanted.”
Unveiled to much acclaim at this year’s Cannes, Aftersun went on to open the Edinburgh Film Festival and will screen at the LFF ahead of its November release. “I didn’t set out to move people, so I’m completely floored by the response,” says Wells. “The real joy in writing is when you find things in front of you that you never intended.”