5/30/2023 0 Comments Dive olly dive![]() The dynamic between Corio and Mescal is nothing short of amazing-they are so comfortable with one another! They're playful and thoughtful, they get joy from one another, but are capable of hurting one another too. She's alert, sensitive, and a totally natural presence. all of the things he feels he must hide-and, for the most part-does hide.įrankie Corio is a newcomer. There are fleeting glimpses of worry and self-loathing, his fears about not being good enough, not being a good provider or failing her. Mescal (so wonderful in "Normal People") gives such a tactile earthy performance, grounded in the details. In the present moment, all is sunshine and laughter, Calum and Sophie having ice cream, getting mud baths, swimming, where it doesn't matter that the resort is cheap and there's construction going on. This once-removed point of view, this slightly distanced stance, gives the film its melancholy melody of an almost elegiac sweetness. Sophie can now look at the things that child Sophie could not see. In a way, "Aftersun" is an act of imaginative empathy. What would it be like if she could talk to him? They would still have so much to say to one another. She wants to get to him, touch him, hold him. Wells intersperses the vacation with surreal dream-like "rave" sequences, where an adult Sophie ( Celia Rowlson-Hall, whose 2016 directorial debut " Ma" I so admired and reviewed for this site) stands on a crowded dance floor, catching glimpses of her father writhing to the music in the intermittent lightning flashes of the strobe lights. She knows her own memories of the vacation. The film, then, is from the adult Sophie's point of view, an adult-a new parent herself-looking back on this vacation, curious about what her father must have been going through. ![]() "Aftersun" is clearly told from Sophie's point of view, but a perceptive viewer will notice there are scenes where Sophie is not present. Their energy together is comfortable, intimate, familiar. They have a little tiff at one point, and he apologizes to her later for his behavior. Calum may be a bit adrift, but he clearly loves his daughter. It's tense when she loses her scuba mask, and she informs him she knows it's expensive and she's sorry. He has brought books on meditation and Tai Chi, suggesting not so much a lifelong practice as a way to stave off anxiety. There are "clues" that his life hasn't quite worked out the way he had hoped. ![]() Does he party too much? He became a father at a young age. Calum talks about getting a new place, where Sophie will have her own room, and maybe starting a new business with someone named "Keith," and from the way he talks about all this it's obvious he barely believes in any of it. Sophie's parents are separated, and she lives mainly with her mother. The multi-level awareness is not in the dialogue, but it's there in the film's gentle rhythms, the editorial choices, the patience and sensitivity of Wells' approach. Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and "Aftersun" understands this. The two things even happen simultaneously. ![]() It is possible to perceive a parent's existential anxiety and still have a great time making a new friend at the arcade. She perceives more than her father thinks she does. The child is perceptive, and senses things, even if she can't put it into words (although often she can). But the depths, as they say, are sounded. The occasional friction is of the normal parent-child variety, nothing too toxic, nothing too traumatic. There's an uneasiness in the sequence, but the source of it is hard to place, or even name, particularly since Calum and Sophie are enjoying their vacation, overall. There's something unknowable about Calum ( Paul Mescal), and maybe this is because Sophie (Frankie Corio) is a child, and he's her dad, and she's just about coming to the age where she's separating herself and becoming her own person. This question lies at the shifting center of Charlotte Wells' moving debut feature "Aftersun," detailing a father-daughter vacation at a cheap resort in Turkey, and the scene above-which comes early on, when we're still getting our bearings-is key.
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