A hugely charming debut feature from writer-director Charlotte Wells, Aftersun combines tender autobiographical drama with superlative performances and ravishing visuals. The Scottish-born, New York-based Wells clearly has plenty of chutzpah, or great connections, or both. Her most recent short, the much-admired Blue Christmas (2017), was shot by world-class cinematographer Robbie Ryan. Now she has made a full-length work starring red-hot Irish rising star Paul Mescal (Normal People, The Lost Daughter) and produced by a heavyweight team including Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Aftersun certainly feels more like the work of a seasoned auteur than a first-timer. Following its world premiere in Critics’ Week in Cannes, this bittersweet gem should have a bright future.
Aftersun is essentially a two-hander between Mescal, who plays sensitive 30-year-old Scottish single dad Calum, and dazzling 11-year-old discovery Frankie Corio as his spirited, perky daughter Sophie. The date is sometime in the late 1990s, the location a holiday resort on the Turkish Riviera, where the pair are on a sunshine break together. The two stars share a warm, easy, playful chemistry on screen that makes their father-daughter bond wholly convincing. Swapping his native Irish brogue for a smooth Scottish accent, Mescal adds to his growing portfolio of soulful, brooding, Brando-ish roles here. But major credit is also due to Corio, a total natural on screen, with magnetic potential if she chooses to pursue more acting work.
Most of the holiday interplay between father and daughter is banal on the surface: swimming, restaurant meals, day trips to tourist sites, and so on. Even so, Aftersun is charged with slow-burn melancholy and ominous portent, as if some looming tragedy awaits just beyond the horizon. Sophie is on the edge of losing her childhood innocence, kissing boys for the first time and eavesdropping on sexual gossip between the older teenagers in the hotel.
Meanwhile, Calum is quietly struggling with issues that his daughter is too young to grasp. Because she is shooting from Sophie’s viewpoint, Wells offers few clues, but there are signs of depression and suicidal intent. “I’m surprised I made it to 30,” he confesses in an unguarded moment. Aftersun was inspired by a real holiday that Wells took with her own father. We never learn what happens to Calum afterwards, but the whole film plays like an elegy to a long-lost loved one, an achingly personal scrapbook of hazy memories.
Shooting on film, Wells and her cinematographer Gabriel Oke give Aftersun a luxuriant colour palette and a precisely tailored look, making extensive use of reflection, slow motion and lyrical underwater footage. For textural contrast, these highly composed scenes are punctuated by bursts of amateur digital-video footage, notionally shot by Sophie, whose glitchy and shaky quality comes to symbolise the fuzzy, unreliable nature of human memory. Framing these flashback scenes are fleeting contemporary glimpses of the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), still haunted by dreams of her father, often glimpsing him under the pulsing strobe lights of a techno club. Her airport farewell to Calum in Turkey has a devastating sense of finality about it, reinforced by an inspired visual echo in these present-day scenes.
Music serves a rich dramatic function in Aftersun. Alongside a dreamy hymnal score by electro-classical composer Oliver Coates, a background jukebox selection of mostly British pop hits fixes the setting firmly in the late 1990s. Even here, Wells pushes against formal convention, slowing the Blur song Tender to a half-speed dirge, then later stripping down the classic Queen and David Bowie hit Under Pressure to its naked vocal tracks. The effect in both cases is one of sensory dislocation and heightened emotional intensity. A tragicomic karaoke scene in which Sophie performs a tuneless demolition of REM’s Losing My Religion, while Calum stubbornly refuses to join her onstage, is almost unbearably poignant.
Director, screenwriter: Charlotte Wells
Cast: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall
Producers: Adele Romanski, Amy Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Mark Ceryak
Cinematography: Gregory Oke
Editing: Blair McClendon
Production Design: Billur Turan
Music: Oliver Coates
Productin companies: Pastel (US), Unified Theory (UK)
World sales: Charades
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In English
98 minutes
