With a surname like that, maybe a lot was going to be expected of this extraordinary first-time feature director. Charlotte Wells’ delectable debut movie has floored audiences all over the world, beginning with its premiere this May in the Critics’ Week at Cannes, which is where I first saw it. It is film about the overwhelming power of the past and its terrible, tragic inaccessibility; a film about a father-daughter relationship achieving a poignant new intimacy at the very moment it has to be relinquished. The title elegantly gestures at something understood only when it has receded into the past, when its heat has cooled, and when some balm is needed.
Aftersun features Paul Mescal and nine-year-old newcomer Frankie Corio as Calum and Sophie: a Scottish guy who, some time in the 90s, has come on a package holiday trip with his kid, from whose mum he is now separated. It’s a summer trip in a budget resort, a sunshine break that is also a kind of farewell – although Sophie does not exactly grasp that. Maybe Calum doesn’t either. Father and daughter amiably get along with no perceivable tension or drama. Calum good-naturedly goofs around with Sophie, who eye-rollingly tolerates his embarrassing dad-dancing at the disco. But one night Calum goes off on his own, stricken by a guilt and an overwhelming love that he can’t properly show her.
Everything is low key and the film is allowed to unspool naturally, like a deceptively simple short story. It is structured in terms of a series of flashbacks experienced by the adult Sophie, and Aftersun is about childhood memories being worn to a sheen and elevated to mystery by being constantly replayed in your mind (like the digital video that Calum is shooting on his state-of-the-art Sony Handycam). New meanings appear that were not there at first, revealed or created by the remembering mind and endowed with a new poignancy.
Conversations about what Aftersun means have been intriguing: for some in the United States, the fact that Calum has three alcoholic drinks over supper with Sophie appears to hint at something irresponsible. Anglo-Saxon audiences might not see anything particularly bad in it. There is also the question of whether or not Calum is now supposed to be dead, a shocking implication (for a character who is so young in the movie) which makes the whole thing even more tragic.
Either way, the loss – and the love – together make up the one big thing overarching the film’s many little moments that traffic uneventfully across the screen. Nothing very dramatic happens, and when something important does occur, it is coolly unemphasised and unsignposted. The artistry is implicit and unostentatious. The details accumulate; the images reverberate and the importance of the central relationship deepens. This film shimmers like a swimming pool of mystery, gaining new converts and followers everywhere it is shown. Nothing deserves the “film of the year” tag more than this.
