Review: the dappled glow of Aftersun
Does one have to like a movie in order to write a good review of it?
It’s not often that, as a critic, I sit down to write about a movie that hasn’t offended me yet which I’m also not eager to compliment. Such is the case for Aftersun — the debut feature from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, in which a grown woman, Sophie (played by Celia Rowlson-Hall), watches camcorder footage of a trip that she took at age eleven (played at that age by Frankie Corio) with her now-absent father, Calum (Paul Mescal). A simple concept, and anybody who’s ever been a child or struggled to connect with a parent should be able to see that Wells has crafted a work of profound tenderness and emotional intelligence.
Why, then, didn’t I enjoy it? Or rather, since I did smile and laugh and scrunch my face in sympathy, didn’t it stick with me? Aftersun has overwhelmingly been identified as one of the best movies of the year, yet I’ve put off writing about it for the better part of a week. What does one say when one is apathetic? How does a critic write about a movie they respect, yet simply don’t care for?
If I’m to be honest in this analysis, I’ll start by admitting that I found it difficult to reconcile the film’s perceptiveness with its rather lumbering aura of film school artiness. Welles makes some sartorial choices that chafe at my sense of style — for instance, the intermittent glimpses we get into an ambiguous nightclub setting, where Sophie catches sight of her father under a pulsing strobe light. These fragments struck me as on-the-nose, poorly shot, and unnecessary: do we really need a visual metaphor to articulate something that is readily apparent in Calum’s and Sohie’s real world interactions?
Equally, I think the ponderous flow of scenes kept me from ever completely entering Wells’ world. This was especially surprising, as normally I’m a pushover for slowed pacing in movies. I wonder if this has something to do with the tradition in which Wells is working: she’s clearly influenced by Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker who’s enjoyed a surge of appreciation in the last decade, culminating in last year’s Sight and Sound magazine election of her 1975 anti-epic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, as the greatest movie of all time. Much of Akerman’s filmography revolves around her mother, or the experiences of a parent — and while, again, I am appreciative of her formal disruptions, her challenges to the hierarchies of film language, I’ve never truly been moved by any of it.
Impressed? Yes. Do I care to watch all of Jeanne Dielman for a second time? Gracious, no.
That being said, while both filmmakers pull their audience in unfamiliar directions, the obsequious weightiness of Akerman’s work is a trap that Wells doesn’t fall into. The young director succeeds in representing a precarious or even hostile ambiance around this father and daughter while also leaving room for levity. It’s evident in Aftersun that Sophie and Calum flit through situations or scenarios that resonate with a certain violence, but, then again, nothing truly vicious ever happens to them. Their world is unrelenting — to occupy it is to risk everything of oneself at all times — and, in the end, they are both intact. Hurt, but alive.
The intactness of these characters has quite a bit to do, I might add, with the actors playing them. As a rule, I try not to place too much emphasis on the work of children in movies; Frankie Corio is too young to be a fully-fledged artist, but she does embody Sophie with wondrous immediacy, delivering the quirks in mannerism, the impulsive gasps for breath while chattering for a video camera, that all children demonstrate in real life.
Meanwhile, as Calum, Paul Mescal is sturdy yet hunched, like an infantryman limping from a wound on the bottom of his foot. He has the head and profile of a Roman general, or prince; he could easily play Odysseus, or Marc Antony. Or Hamlet, for that matter. In another time, he might’ve made the perfect collaborator for Olivier or John Ford — but, thankfully, Mescal is working today, and the loving attention that Corio’s Sophie lavishes on him is echoed by Wells’ direction.
We get to truly study the actor, and bask in his particular beauty, without straining under the burden of overly-robust or brutal ideals of manhood. As a result, Paul Mescal emerges as a man of quiet elegance — a salt-of-the-earth presence, both puckish and remorseful in bearing.
All the same, I can’t help but imagine that John Ford might’ve seized the mythic aspect of Mescal’s gifts, rendering him a god, whereas Welles merely settles for the poetic, making him illusory. I recently revisited a fifty-year-old interview of Bette Davis on The Dick Cavett Show, in which she talks about her dissatisfaction with the “naturalistic” style of acting that had, by then, taken complete hold of American cinema. “I think acting should look as if we were working a little,” she proclamates, before drawing a parallel between her colleagues’ technique and the low-key ambiance of movies at large. “It’s just life. Well, we all have life… I think [the movies] should be a little bit larger. A little theatrical.”
At the end of the day, I may simply be a trooper in Ms. Davis’, as she put it, “old-fashioned” camp. Realism is a novelty, but it’s not why I go to the movies. Aftersun is a sensitive, observant study in the gulf of knowledge that stretches between parents and their children. And that isn’t enough for me.
