Aftersun

Written by Hannah Mildner

After my grandmother’s funeral, my sister brought out a box of photographs she had found under piles of dust-lined books and yellowed sheet music. For the next hour, we flicked through them almost hungrily, staring at faces we had always known and yet never seen before. Our parents, however, ignored the photos, busying themselves with anything else. Maybe they were embarrassed by the flares and the 1970s hair. Maybe they preferred to avoid the thought that, soon enough, we would be poring over these photos simply to remember them – just as we had done to remember their parents. While I have always been acutely aware of my parents’ age, being one of the only 9-year-olds in my school with parents over 50, this is not a thought I’m familiar with. When you’re a child, it doesn’t occur to you that your parents had lives before you; it doesn’t occur to you that there is a life ‘after’ your parents. Eventually, though, all we’ll have are photos and memories. Aftersun director Charlotte Wells grapples with this beautifully in an outstanding directorial debut.

“When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?”, Aftersun’s Sophie (Frankie Corio) asks her dad Calum (Paul Mescal). This is perhaps the biggest question asked in the film, which traces a father-daughter holiday in Turkey in the late 1990s. Calum is only 31 but quietly hides self-loathing and a fear of ageing behind a façade of tai chi-propelled calm. Sophie has just turned 11 and is seemingly on the precipice of adolescence. She scoffs when Calum suggests she introduce herself to a group of “kids”, preferring instead to trail behind the rowdier teenagers she meets. She watches and listens as the teenagers around her explore love and sex; she runs away for a night; she has her first kiss. But Aftersun is about more than growing up – it’s about growing up to become your parents.

Within the first 10 minutes of the film, masterful editing suggests Calum and Sophie are more similar than one might think a 31-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl could be (a sleeping Sophie morphs into her father the next morning). Wells’ quiet but powerful writing takes this further. We see the two applying after-sun lotion to each other’s faces, literally caring for and protecting each other. The scene in which Sophie takes on the caretaker role comes later, implying that she’s learning from her father. Whether she’s learning how to parent or just how to love is unclear - perhaps there is no real distinction to be made. One of the more heartbreaking parallels between the two is made when Sophie is reluctant to go out and explains how she feels: “you [feel] tired and down, and it feels like your bones don’t work. You’re just tired and everything is tired. Like you’re sinking.” Corio delivers the line masterfully, nonchalant while still revealing that she’s experiencing something that’s all too familiar to Calum. He reacts by brushing it off before glaring into the mirror and spitting at his reflection: no matter how much after-sun he buys, he can’t protect his child from this.

The only problem here, of course, is that Sophie could not possibly remember these moments. Wells hints at this, as shots of Calum are initially upside-down in this scene, mimicking Sophie’s perspective as she hangs her head off her bed. But as his anger is revealed, the camera is flipped. We’re no longer looking at a memory but an interpretation. Though the film is interspersed with camcorder footage that – it’s eventually revealed – Sophie is watching 20 years later, this is not an accurate record of the holiday. One of the most telling signs of this is the recurring rave that Calum escapes to. Throughout Aftersun Wells cuts to Calum dancing almost painfully under strobing lights. In a child’s visualisation of her father’s struggles, Sophie appears both as a child and an adult desperately trying to hold onto her dad. The attempt is ultimately fruitless and the rave becomes a home for both Calum and Sophie’s troubles.

Going through that box of photos I realised just how much I look like my mother. Aftersun reminded me that this resemblance is more than skin deep. Kudos should be given to Mescal and Corio, who perfectly portray this with the smallest micro-expressions. Mescal stuns even as he sobs in a minute-long shot of his back. But Aftersun’s poignancy is also dependent on Gregory Oke’s cinematography, which captures the saturated colours and unfamiliar details that children are wont to remember. The sound team also contribute a great deal, portraying seemingly accurate memories through naturalistic sound editing, as well as dreamlike hazes with haunting renditions of Blur’s “Tender” and Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”.

While Aftersun’s tension ebbs and flows as much as the sea on which Wells zeroes in on, the film is never distressing. After all, one of the first scenes provides constant reassurance: Calum records Sophie as she waves goodbye, skipping and smiling giddily. This is the image of a child who loves and is loved; who, in the end (of the film at least), will be alright. It’s also an image of comfort: Wells ends the film with this clip, panning to an adult Sophie who is watching the video, finally and already Calum’s age. The camera then reveals an impossible memory of Calum, who closes the camcorder and retreats back into the rave, doors swinging shut behind him. While this is certainly not a hopeful scene for Calum – who it is implied was never again seen – it remains a testament to his love for his daughter. Though Sophie can now imagine and understand her father’s pain, those doors were closed when she was a child, leaving her only with care and love.