Aftersun
Directed by Charlotte Wells
Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio star in Aftersun
“Oh my god, what even is that?”
“These are my moves.”
This simple couplet, which opens Charlotte Wells’ fresh, funny and ultimately heartbreaking debut film, Aftersun, could be a poem titled ‘Dad Dancing’.
The speakers are 11-year old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her young father Calum (Paul Mescal), who is just turning 31. The pair are on a budget holiday in the Med in the 1990s, which Sophie documents on camcorder and which we later realise is being recollected by an older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall). Memory, and the formation of memory, is very much the underlying theme uniting a series of holiday snapshots, some happier than others.
Sophie teases Calum about his age, and asks him what he thought he would be doing at this age, back when he was her age. The gap between any 11-year old’s comprehension of this question and any 31-year old’s honest answer is a vast gulf, and Wells’ film is adept at peering into such chasms as they yawn fleetingly, without breaking the young girl’s sunny mood.
This is finely-judged stuff. The script is pushing a lot of the same buttons as the likes of About A Boy or Billy Elliot, with their sensitive pre-teen protagonists who must negotiate the issues of the adults in their lives. But the formal qualities of this film are wildly different. Inside the first three minutes, Wells plays with film format, POV, realism and timeframe with a lyrical ease and fluidity that calls to mind stalwarts of European arthouse cinema.
I wish we had more UK cinema that did this. To grossly over-simplify and generalise about UK film of the last thirty years: formally adventurous UK filmmakers have tended towards making horror and comedy, while stories about ordinary people living their lives tend to be told straightforwardly and classically. A counterexample, or fellow outlier, would be Lynne Ramsay’s blending of real lives with expressionist formal strategies; I thought of Ratcatcher while watching Aftersun, though Wells’ film is a gentler experience.
I can’t wait to see where this lyrical and poetic formal approach to slice-of-life character-driven storytelling takes Charlotte Wells next; it’s a heady combination.
AFTERSUN (2022) Written by Charlotte Wells | Shot by Gregory Oke | Edited by Blair McClendon
