Mementos of grief
Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun is a haunting excavation of memory and loss, seen through the eyes of a young girl.
There’s an unnerving, awkward and slyly moving scene in Charlotte Wells’s debut feature, Aftersun, in which 11-year-old
Sophie (Frankie Corio), on a late-’90s package holiday with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), submits their names for a karaoke performance. It’s part of an entertainment night at their “all-inclusive” budget resort, which is located in Türkiye but seemingly populated entirely by Brits.
Calum, who wasn’t forewarned of Sophie’s plan, refuses to go on stage, even when the music – “in the style of ” REM’S “Losing My Religion” – starts and the brightly dressed MC is calling them up. Undeterred, Sophie barrels down and takes up the mic, sure that her father will eventually join her. He never does, leaving her to handle their hoped-for duet alone in the spotlight (“tryin’ to keep up with you,” she sings, “and I don’t know if I can do it”).
As he hangs her out to dry, we watch these characters dealing with complex, even contradictory, emotions. Sophie is at once defiant and embarrassed. Calum looks on with a mixture of empathy, regret and cold remove.
It’s a sequence that is emblematic of this impressive film, a coming-of-age portrait pulled from the cloudy haze of memory, in which a rarely seen grown-up Sophie (dancer/ filmmaker Celia Rowlson-hall) tries to piece together a portrait of her now-departed, enigmatic father through revisiting camcorder videos of a holiday they took in the age of Chumbawamba and the “Macarena”.
For all its evocative end-of-a-century soundtrack – Blur’s “Tender” is used brilliantly, warped like an old record – Aftersun is mostly concerned with the unspoken, in a sunkissed two-hander where each character grapples with internal conflicts. Sophie is dealing with the collision between childhood and adolescence, but she’s also beginning to understand theory of mind through her father, as she is forced to realise that he has an inner life that she can never know, an experience entirely his own.
Calum is struggling to balance his desire to be a good father with his own desires, his own feelings. His happy-holiday face barely conceals deep emotional turmoil. His love, and his sense of care for his child, is always there but his physical presence betrays a psychological absence.
The holiday is in celebration of his 31st birthday, though any time Sophie mentions his birthday, ageing or the passing of time, Calum seems to be thrown into instant existential despair. He reacts with annoyance or avoidance, disappearing into his own thoughts or, in a memorable scene, into the ocean at night. On a daytrip to some Roman ruins, Sophie recruits a busload of tourists to sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” in his honour and he looks on aghast, a mixture of abject terror and grumpy-dad dejection.
The fact that a man on the eve of his 31st birthday has an 11-year-old daughter suggests a backstory that Wells never explicitly tells. Wells is a dab hand at suggesting complex histories and vivid stories that exist outside the frame. She hints at this particular element in psychedelic interstitial sequences set on a strobe-lit dance floor, flashes of frozen faces seen moving through a space so black it feels less nightclub than void.
Early in the film we witness two young people dancing together: these are, perhaps, the unprepared club kids who’ll soon conceive our central character. By the end, we watch the adult Sophie embracing her father – frozen in the time from their holiday – on the dance floor. It’s an instant in which Aftersun cinches the viewer in its embrace, connecting past and present onscreen.
This meeting puts the adult Sophie and her father on equal footing. Her childhood mystery and misunderstanding has slowly turned to adult acceptance and recognition. When we first meet the adult Sophie, she wakes to the sound of a baby crying. No more is made of it, but it suggests she is now a parent, at the same age her father was on this holiday. In the past they’re separated by a generation. In the present, in Aftersun’s fantastical flourishes, they’re together in a gesture at once wishful and spectral, with Wells folding time on itself as she strives for the cinematic sublime.
In interviews, Wells – a 30-something director whose father died when she was
16 – rejects the notion that Aftersun is autobiographical. Instead, it seems that what she’s doing is akin to what the grownup Sophie is attempting: using memory and moving imagery to summon the spirit of her late father, a phantom who can never quite be pinned down.
Calum is played brilliantly by Paul Mescal, who came to fame via a performance in the series Normal People, in which he played another young man struggling to grapple with repressed emotions. Here he doesn’t deliver a flashy turn, but his performance earned the Irish actor an Oscar nomination. Mescal has no chance of catching the Best Actor frontrunners – Brendan Fraser’s redemptionarc fat suit, Colin Farrell’s career coronation, Austin Butler’s method Elvis – but it shows how far this small, intensely personal picture has come.
Aftersun achieves this through its cinematic artistry, emotional profundity and character complexity. Mescal’s memorable performance is in service of a character that is a confluence of shifting impressions. Wells often shoots him partially obscured or at a distance, visually conveying his elusiveness. Calum ripples with flashes of anger and moments of humour, but mostly you get the sense that there’s more underneath the surface. His slightly embarrassing self-help turn towards meditation and tai chi shows a yearning for something bigger. He speaks of business ideas but clearly has no talent for it: the subtext of a budget holiday is finally spoken aloud when Sophie – fresh from her karaoke embarrassment – dismisses his offer of singing lessons by spitting: “[stop] offering to pay for something when I know you don’t have the money”.
Yet Calum buys an expensive Turkish carpet he clearly can’t afford, suggesting more his impracticality than a desire for status objects, the daydreamer seduced by the art of its pattern. “Each of these carpets tell a different story,” Calum explains to Sophie. This carpet sure does, when Wells subtly slides it beneath the feet of the grownup Sophie.
In this tiny, wordless moment, the filmmaker does what she does best: suggesting vast ideas and feelings that exist off the screen, just beyond our grasp. It’s only briefly seen, but it shines as a symbol: a holiday souvenir turned cenotaph, connecting its central character to her lost father. Aftersun isn’t as tangible as a rug, but it does feel like a memento: memory and grieving amplified through the vivid prism of cinema.
Aftersun is screening in cinemas nationally.