Aftersun Review: Masterful portrait of a father-daughter relationship

In a scene from Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a daughter forcefully takes the stage at the Karaoke evening of a Turkish resort. Her father, hesitantly sits in the audience, refusing to join in. For the most part we see his back, stiffening, but never quite straight in the manner that angered men would be. Later in the film, we abruptly cut to a scene of the same father weeping copiously, bare-backed, his lean body convulsing gently. Aftersun is a delicate but devastatingly intimate film about memories and their presumptive worth as a source of life’s little comforts and its disconcerting questions. It achieves so, often by doing very little. Remarkably, not a lot happens in the film, except every moment that plays out on screen is the consequent image of years of buffering memory and interpretations. It’s understated, casual and stealthily tragic. Wells’ film is largely a flashback to a staycation that Sophie, played by an excellent Frankie Corio, took with her father Calum in a low-key Turkish resort some twenty years ago. Part dilapidated, part in the process of being resuscitated, the resort possibly echoes the state of Calum’s distraught mind. Paul Mescal plays the father, with a certain brutish charm. He is endearing with just a hint of poignant mystery about him. Divorced and anguished, Calum is evidently trying to separate his inner misery from the outside where he must, for the sake of his teenage daughter, offer a stolid front. Scenes where he and Sophie interact with a bunch of older teenagers vacationing at the same resort are instructive in just how much candid restraint Calum must exercise as a matter of template, to prevent his outer shell from breaking. To say Aftersun is minimalist would be to undermine the potency of its precocious craft. Corio’s curiosity, powered by an age that basically transmits nervous energy, is matched tenderly with a father who simply cannot afford to open up. The two speak to each other casually, laugh and dance, as the superficial details of any vacation are dispensed with ease. Wells’ camera neither fetishizes nor undercuts the exoticness of the vacation. It is a budget holiday after all. In a scene, Corie lies flat on their room bed, claiming how even the routine of a vacation can after a point, become boring. Peeved but still controlled, Calum spits angrily onto the bathroom mirror, away from his daughter’s eyes. It’s a moment of screeching tension, punctuated with the recklessness of an accident. But is it so? Because this is essentially Corio’s memory of what that trip was and must have been like away from her sight. We’ll never quite know. It’s a firm if imprecise portrayal of a man she does, she is still trying to figure out. Aftersun’s biggest strength is of course the chemistry between Corio and Mescal, an endearing yet life-like bond that suggests both fealty and friction. There are moments of blissful abandonment interspersed with those of controlled, dialled-down rage here. Sometimes they interchange places even, underlining the uncertainty of creating a mix of both myth and matter. It is after all a patched-up portrait of a complex man, Sophie, is trying to remember through their last days together. To her, this is also a source of trauma, as it is her final memory of her father. It’s what she cherishes and dread in equal measure. Details and imagination fill in the gaps, and what comes together, is a stunning, often hallucinatory portrayal of the ordinary transcending to become extraordinary. Mescal and Corio are assisted by the masterful direction of Wells who manages to elevate a casual trip into a thing of surreal, often haunting recollection. A painting half-remembered, and half-imagined, as best an adult Sophie can commit. If Wells’ debut feature is sign of things to come, she’d become a filmmaker to reckon with. Everyone on the drawing board here is young and undiscovered to an extent and yet the performances, the craft feels assured, and distinct. It’s easy to lose control of a story that must feel like a dream as much as it must also feel like stately reality. Wells finds that balance, interspacing moments of screeching revelation with the casual but predictable dexterity of a vacation simply trying to live up to its expected modest heights. There aren’t any epiphanies, or shattering events here, but simply the usual, perceived through a profoundly sensitised lens. It’s incredible how ordinary lives can throb with oscillatory drama without ever really becoming dramatic per se. That’s possibly the beauty of cinema and the tragedy of life, that nothing ever quite translates, the way we believe it ought to. In a scene where Sophie gets a couple of people to sing Happy Birthday to her unsuspecting father, perched on a rocky gradient, we are denied the clear sight of his face. It’s destiny, perhaps, to not entirely know the ones you think you did. Aftersun is now streaming on Mubi India

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .