Aftersun: Childhood Memory Recollection
At what age do we start to understand our parents?
Calum’s depression is a mystery to his young daughter Sophie while on a vacation in Turkey and it doesn’t become clear to her until her adult years when she is going through a similar experience. In a masterpiece of a feature debut, director Charlotte Wells gets closer to finding out who Calum is only to grow more mysterious. As we continue to spend time with him, we never fully understand the why for his action or behavior. It mirrors how children do not know the prehistory of their parents and meet them in the middle of their lifetimes. The audience views Calum through the view of Sophie so we only know as much as she does.
Aftersun is a snapshot of a vacation between this father and daughter. The entire experience is crafted through Sophie’s eyes from childhood and adulthood. The few days spent with her father are told in first-person mixed with the wisdom she gains as she gets older and becomes a parent herself to gain a retrospective on that vacation. Simply describe this film, it is a story of an 11-year-old girl and her father taking a trip to Turkey to celebrate her birthday. He looks like more of a brother than a father. At a point in his life where he is overwhelmed and doesn’t know the direction, he is going in. They are just normal people taking a vacation together.
Watching this father/daughter combination does not feel like watching a movie. Everything that happens to them is like they are the only people in the world. We get to share in the tiny moments and wandering shots that make it feel so intimate and as if we are invited along on the vacation. We are seeing what the other hotel guests aren’t, like Calum smoking and swaying on the balcony. This movie could be described as dull because really nothing happens, but it is this trait that makes it worth watching until the very end. Throughout its runtime, there is always a sense of uneasiness waiting for something to happen. A lot of the moments never explicitly tell us what is happening but show us. Even though this movie is a series of happy memories between Calum and Sophie, something feels very sad about it.
It is very obvious that something has happened, but the what and when are never revealed. It will be frustrating as you are putting the pieces together of these people you are spending time with for the next hour and a half. It is their simplicity that makes you feel very invested in their narrative and relationship. Sophie’s memories feel very exact and symbolic as it is this specific event she is remembering as an adult. It is not her remembering her father but where she was at the age of 11. The movie leaves many hints from the music to fashion about where she is. These little time markers never feel nostalgic but are there for a reason. Our memories connect with the sounds and sights and their relation to what we are trying to remember.
Wells does more than just present a father-daughter drama, she is using Sophie’s memories to examine how we remember and how film can capture that in the first-person point of view. Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal are exceptional in these roles and make it an extremely believable narrative to support Wells’s experiment in memory. They both portray effortless love perfectly as he withholds his reality from his daughter to let her have the best memories of their time together. It leaves us knowing that as an adult she will have a lot of exploring later in life on these events with her father.
The age of Sophie is so important to the story, she is on the cusp of adulthood. On this vacation, Sophie is starting to grow more aware of herself while Calum needs to adjust to the changes in his daughter. He starts to think ahead for his daughter when he notices her change in clothing and hanging around older hotel guests.
Aftersun is so interesting in the way it explores the reality of parents that they keep their children in the dark about. There are multiple times it is hinted that Calum does not have much money. These details are never explored deeply due to the narrative being in Sophie’s hands. These big issues are on the horizon for her as she understands what is going on with her father but not to the full extent. She handles the issue not as caring as she should if she understood its effect on her father.
The realities of Calum are the rainclouds hanging over Sophie’s blissful memories and explain where the sadness comes in. The film ends with you wanting more from this story and continuing to see how the relationship evolves into Sophie’s adulthood. These two strangers become family to you by the end as you still don’t know everything about them.