![]() There’s so much about Calum that she’s desperate to understand without asking, so we hang onto his every word in much the same way. Sophie plays with a group of older kids she meets at the pool and clearly delights in the thrilling autonomy of doing older kid stuff, but she’s never the least bit disinterested in hanging out with her dad. Sometimes Sophie wears a “NO FEAR” hat, just one of the many impeccable period details in a film so precise about its point in time that it seems to take place at the exact moment when the “Macarena” was transitioning from “best part of the party” to “begrudging obligation” (a cringe-inducing karaoke scene in the second half of the movie is set to a period-appropriate track too perfect to spoil). Is this what he was doing when Sophie was out making silly little videos on her dad’s camera? At one point we see him spit at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes he practices tai chi when he’s in the room by himself, his body obscured from the camera by a bathroom wall. Calum smokes on the balcony of their hotel room after she falls asleep, standing on the other side of a glass screen door. He calls Sophie “poppett,” and talks to his daughter with a guarded intimacy that makes it hard to say if he’s trying to keep her safe from the world or protect her from himself. Gregory Oke’s fuzzy and tactile cinematography suggests a more sensitive read, its gossamer textures recalling the work of Lance Acord in a movie that often feels like a platonic riff on “Lost in Translation.”Ĭalum has a cast on his arm, but claims that he doesn’t remember how he hurt it. Wells’ camera sometimes lingers on her characters during the kind of private moments when they suppose no one can see them, as if the film itself is goading us into assuming the worst. We look for discrepancies, scanning the screen for answers to questions that we don’t even know to ask yet until even the film’s most banal images seem rife with secrets. Wells’ ingenious construction allows “Aftersun” to unfold from a dual perspective that seems to filter it through the eyes of an adult and a child at the same time. And we sense that she does this because she never saw him again. We sense that she re-watches the camcorder footage in the desperate, keening hope that her dad might be able to show it to her in time to save her from it. As if by osmosis, we intuit that she’s haunted by the feeling that some ineffable part of herself will always remain just out of reach, like the patch of skin between her boney pre-teen shoulders where Calum had to apply the sunscreen for her. Both can be evocative, but neither are enough to connect all the dots not when you’re trying to re-trace someone you loved from the vague silhouette they left behind.Īll these years later - an entire lifetime since the tan she got in Turkey faded back into freckled white - Sophie has only grown more desperate to see what the home videos from that trip will never show her. Others are much harder, as still and tactile as a rug on the floor. Some of those sources are soft as ghosts, and likewise change shape in the shadows. ![]() And yet, personal experience tells us that our pasts are composed from an infinite swirl of different sources - real and invented - each of them crudely sewn together with the same desperation that our sleeping brains might arrange a billion random neurons into a semi-coherent dream. We tend to think of memories as crystallized moments of time, loosely strung together along the trellises of a drooping chandelier somewhere deep within our mind. ![]() Like Sophie, all we can do is sift for meaning amidst the rubble and hope to fill in the haunted spaces between the man she knew and the man she lost. The eerily objective home videos and the semi-imagined 35mm scenes that “Aftersun” wraps around them both suggest that Calum was struggling with a demon of one stripe or another, and that he was doing his best to hide that struggle from his daughter during their too-rare time together, but Wells denies us the details. Some kids at their rundown hotel assumed they were siblings, and now they would be about the same age.Īs an adult who we only see in glimpses, Sophie rewatches the MiniDV footage that she and Calum recorded on that vacation, eagerly scanning the standard-definition video in search of the clues that a child might have missed. That was the trip when she turned 11, and Calum - played by “Normal People” breakout Paul Mescal, who makes a premature leap into dad roles with tremendous poise and a triggering sense of parental mystery - turned 32. When Sophie (remarkable newcomer Frankie Corio, real as can be) thinks of her father, she thinks of the Turkish holiday they went on together in the late ’90s. ‘The Sweet East’ Review: Sean Price Williams’ Directorial Debut Stars Talia Ryder as a Teen in Five Cults ![]()
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