Aftersun Charts the Paradoxes of the Parent-Child Relationship

Table Of Content

• They Get Hit by Cars for Your Amusement. Will ‘The Fall Guy’ Get Them a Little Love?
• 'Aftersun' follows a father and daughter's last summer vacation together
• Victoria Justice Talks About Her First Sex Scene
• Director Charlotte Wells on her debut Aftersun — the most lauded British film of the year
• Features
• Teskey Brothers Manager Jeremy Furze Wins Big at 2024 AAM Awards

The fear of aging seems entangled with his depression and anxiety about his life. In some moments, it even seems like Calum would love to switch places with Sophie and have the ability to do it all over again, so he'd have more time to get it right. Calum walks away, not going back into the real world, but into Sophie’s memories. You see the strobe lights coming from behind the door, and this seems to imply that this becomes Sophie’s final active memory of her father. It’s the final night of Sophie (Frankie Corio) and Calum’s (Paul Mescal) Turkey vacation. They celebrate with some ice cream and some dancing to “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie (it’s one of the best movie dance scenes of 2022).

They Get Hit by Cars for Your Amusement. Will ‘The Fall Guy’ Get Them a Little Love?

I needed something to match the rhythm of the dance scene and it irrefutably worked. But because we’d avoided that in the film for the most part, we figured we could get away with it. It felt like a gift to the viewer, like here’s a little bit more of a hint. It gives you closure that you are correct in the direction your mind has been spiraling. Their holiday came to an end, and Sophie remembered how her father had the broadest smile as he danced to a piece of music.

'Aftersun' follows a father and daughter's last summer vacation together

Charlotte Wells might have heard me weeping at the premiere of her film. “There was someone behind me crying quite audibly,” says the Scottish director, who was still putting the finishing touches to her feature debut, Aftersun, when it crash-landed at Cannes back in May. She’s been forced to play grief counsellor to scores of traumatised viewers ever since. I have a torso on an hour’s worth of digital video playing chess. All of our heads are framed out of screen because the chess board is more interesting. My generation has more than the generation before, and this current generation record more than ever.

Victoria Justice Talks About Her First Sex Scene

In an interview with Brief Take, director and writer Charlotte Wells states that the overall arc of the movie is adult Sophie looking back and reflecting on this trip and her father. At the very beginning, the recording freezes and you can see a reflection of adult Sophie watching these home videos. Ultimately, I was flipping through some old holiday albums and I think that’s where the idea really crystallized. I was struck by how young my dad looked — I was probably around the age that he was in the photographs. I continued to work on it and took myself on a holiday after finishing film school to Cypress with one of my classmates. Getting permission for the music you want is a very real thing.

Director Charlotte Wells on her debut Aftersun — the most lauded British film of the year

It should come as no surprise, then, that “Aftersun” was shepherded along by Pastel, the production company co-founded by “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins and his longtime producing partner Adele Romanski. It was Romanski who pushed her old film school pal Jenkins to get cracking on “Moonlight” after years of hesitation, and she found herself in a similar position when she first encountered Wells in 2017. As a metaphor for the difficulty of giving vent to painful emotions, a spout clogged with leaves is almost too apt.

And yet sometimes I still forget to point the camera at things that you might wish you had later on. I don’t think that feeling necessarily would ever change, of always reaching for something you don’t quite have. Yet for all the universality out of specificity, there are very fundamental themes that a lot of people can connect with, and a core parental relationship that I don’t think is unique. Even if the one portrayed on screen [between a young father, Calum, and his daughter, Sophie] is one less often portrayed on screen. The film is certainly open, and I have seen people bring many different kinds of experiences to it, but that was certainly an unintended expression – yet it was so immediately legible to this young man. It meant so much that it connected that personally and so specifically.

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“There was an understanding between us that he would add his own nuances and understanding of Calum to his performance,” says Wells. And yet the highs they share on the trip are no less real for it, from heckling the dreary in-house entertainers to impromptu games of water polo in the pool. She wanted to sing karaoke with him, but he was not confident enough to go onstage.

He said that he was first diagnosed in 2016, and his most recent chemotherapy treatment was just one week prior, perThe Oregonian. For Sophie, the tapes are anchor points for her to remember memories. The things she sees in the tapes are a combination of things remembered and imagined. We are a cultural charity, a National Lottery funding distributor, and the UK’s lead organisation for film and the moving image. Here was the uncommonly mature debut of a filmmaker of masterful control and deep wells of empathy.

Teskey Brothers Manager Jeremy Furze Wins Big at 2024 AAM Awards

The shoot was not without its hiccups, including the aforementioned dance sequence. Wells shot it in a UK tomato factory with the help of a New York choreographer who had 45 minutes to rehearse the sequence in advance. After the shoot, they realized that the strobe light was out of sync with the audio. They ended up reshooting the entire thing last December in London, only to find that the lighting was all off. The actors were wisely given two weeks to bond before shooting began, resulting in an intensely authentic rapport that seems to radiate from the screen.

Her reflections become a powerful and heartbreaking portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the dad she knew with the man she didn’t. Twenty years after she last saw Calum, Sophie reflects on that time, which they spent together in a Turkish holiday resort. Slowly creeping into adolescence, Sophie is trying to uncover her sexuality, and spending rare time with her young father, often mistaken for her brother. The camera was a record he had for himself that Sophie now has. The footage is the only point of view of Calum that Sophie and we have. Through the camera, we have his only direct point of view during their holiday in Turkey.

Aftersun: Charlotte Wells Film Review - Loud And Clear Reviews

Aftersun: Charlotte Wells Film Review.

Posted: Wed, 25 May 2022 13:08:54 GMT [source]

The film follows a young father, Calum (played by Normal People’s Paul Mescal), and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (the newcomer Frankie Corio), who are spending a week-long vacation on the coast of Turkey. Sophie treasures her time with Calum, who doesn’t live in Scotland with the rest of her family and who, at 31, with boyish features, is often mistaken for her older brother. This vacation is framed through the perspective of present-day Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who appears occasionally throughout the movie. Now an adult, she’s sifting through her memories, hoping to better understand the man she was so dazzled by a lifetime ago. Some of those memories are reliable, documented on camcorder footage from their trip. What’s clear is that Sophie can’t shake their week in Turkey.

It was the only time he could spend all by himself, and with a sense of peace, he swayed to an inaudible rhythm. The father-daughter dynamic was a frequent topic of conversation after her first feature-film debut Aftersun, a film about a father and daughter. 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) goes on summer vacation to a Turkish resort with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), who lives apart. The two spend happy, precious moments with each other, sometimes conversing awkwardly with a camcorder in one hand. In writing Aftersun, she played back old Mini-DV tapes that her father shot of her, sometimes drawing dialogue from the footage.

It stars beloved Irish actor Paul Mescal as a young father, Calum, while breakout actress Frankie Corio portrays his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie. The driving force behind the film was my desire to represent that kind of father. At the same time, it presented challenges because people are accustomed to seeing the deadbeat dad onscreen, and that’s what they want to see.

Making it, though, meant toiling over every detail, carefully sculpting the film’s precise but organic flow. “I wrote so many openings and so many endings,” Wells sighs. Wells’ film education continued at New York University where she made several shorts. Even in her student films you can see an uncommon balance of subtlety and revelation. In Wells’ films, there’s often a surface reality and a hidden, more painful one. In “Laps,” which was inspired by a similar experience Wells had on the subway on her way to NYU, a young woman is sexually assaulted on a crowded train where no one notices — or, at least, no one seems to notice.