It’s all about the sun lotion.
In Aftersun, the debut feature from writer-director Charlotte Wells, a divorced father (Paul Mescal) takes his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a holiday to a resort in Turkey, where we see sun lotion applied to skin multiple times: out of affectionate duty, on the father’s part, to Sophie’s back; then later, between a couple on a boat as a form of sensual flirtation, while Sophie curiously watches. Toward the end of the film, when the father reminds Sophie at the pool that she needs more lotion, she insists on doing it herself. So much has changed since they first arrived—for him, for her, for the world.
There is a time, probably somewhere around 11, when your kid no longer wants to hold your hand. It’s inevitable, understandable, and devastating. Aftersun captures the full weight of this experience. Sophie and her father continue to have a lively, rich relationship—the movie fairly quickly dispels any early concerns about abuse that viewers might have—but their dynamic shifts significantly over the course of the vacation, as Sophie learns a number of things about adulthood, including her father’s struggle to survive it.
It’s clear from the opening scene that Aftersun is being told from the point of view of Sophie as an adult (Celia Rowlson-Hall), as she scours video footage from that trip, trying to fully understand what transpired. Wells and editor Blair McClendon incisively weave those home-movie snippets with straightforward, third-person scenes of the time in Turkey, as well as first-person moments from the young Sophie’s point of view (in which the camera often drifts away from the father’s face, as memories do). Then there are occasional, jarring flashes to the adult Sophie on a strobe-lit dance floor, a motif that will be crucial to the film’s shattering ending.
Mescal, also quite good in this year’s God’s Creatures, effortlessly shifts among the roles a father of an 11-year-old must play: caregiver, friend, mentor, rule enforcer. Corio, a novice, has the sort of unconscious ease that every good child performance needs, as well as a subtle self-awareness that is crucial to this particular role. And together, they’re a delight: teasing, caring, sparring—in increasingly momentous ways.
Aftersun succeeds on almost every count; it has a humble score by Oliver Coates that ebbs and flows like a wave, as well as a perceptive use of pop songs from the period (Blur’s “Tender,” R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”) that are tellingly distorted and slowed. Perhaps its most impressive achievement is the way the movie subtly, artfully, piercingly but never pointedly hints at the father’s troubled inner state. (At one point a bus violently cuts across the screen just after he crosses the street.) As more of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed, the movie never exploits them. Instead, they fall into place the way memories do. Indeed, the way the best movies do: as revelations that are nevertheless mysterious.
(10/31/2022)
