If you were to rank the most difficult adolescence, 11 might not be the first, but it’s certainly at the top. It’s just a horrifying, hilariously awkward moment of still being a kid but with an agonizingly heightened awareness of all those teenage things that are just out of reach. And it’s only a moment, after all, but when you’re in it, when you’re only 11 years old, the days are long, the weeks go by slowly, and the years feel like a lifetime.
In “Aftersun,” writer-director Charlotte Wells invites audiences, at least in memory, to return to that age with Sophie (Frankie Corio), 11, and her father Calum (Paul Mescal), almost 31, on vacation at a resort in of Turkey. Sophie is the one reminiscing here, 20 years later, reaching the age her father entered on this trip, which is fairly standard mid-90s as far as a middle-class vacation goes. But this holiday will acquire exceptional importance because it will be the last Sophie will ever spend with her father.
We don’t get a lot of facts about Sophie and Calum. He obviously conceived her young and is no longer with her mother, although they still say “I love you” on the phone, which confuses Sophie. But from their first on-screen moments together, there’s a palpable tenderness between the pair, even though they don’t often spend much time together. Young dads, especially single ones, don’t get much love from the movies, and “Aftersun” is in part an ode to that very specific, very sweet bond between father and teenage daughter that they’ll both get along with sometime soon.
Calum doesn’t have a lot of money, but he has enough for this small resort, which has a pool and water slides and a few excursions. There’s also a beach, pool table, some arcade games, and karaoke one night. It’s not, you might say, particularly sophisticated or instagrammable. This is what life is like, or was like back when not everyone pretended to be a star. And thank goodness for the revelation that Frankie Corio dresses, looks, acts and feels like a real kid and not an actor reading lines written by an adult. Mescal, too, moves beautifully in a complex role that doesn’t involve a tormented romance.
But that’s only part of the lovable, haunting authenticity of “Aftersun,” in which a grown woman tries to remember and make sense of the father she loved dearly and has come to realize that she is him never really knew either.
It’s a lot of pressure to spend a week in Turkey when you’re 11 and don’t expect to look after your parents’ spiritual welfare, but life is so cruel. Sophie can remember exactly what she wore to dinner one night, the arrangement of the books on the table in her room, and intense details about the random teenagers she plays pool with a few times. But she cannot solve the mystery of Calum.
“Aftersun” doesn’t play like a traditional narrative, Wells and cinematographer Gregory Oke put you in a kind of dream state. Sometimes you are privy to whole “scenes”, other times you are trying hard to see what is happening in the reflection on a TV screen.
Memory, of course, is imperfect—especially when shaped by the trauma of loss. Wells perfectly captures the inherent disorder of it all in her first feature film. This is a collage of emotions pieced together from photos, a souvenir rug, shaky home videos where someone is inevitably sulking or protesting the video, the mind of course, and that summer’s awful/wonderful songs, like Bran Van 3000’s “Drinking in.” LA” or the Macarena. And though it makes your heart ache, for Sophie and Calum, for the times you were casually cruel to a loved one, for the days and moments you now struggle to remember, it’s one of those cinematic experiences that You won’t be able to experience it again anytime soon.
“Aftersun,” an A24 release hitting theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “brief sexual material and some speech.” Running time: 96 minutes. Four stars out of four.
MPA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17s must have an accompanying parent or legal guardian.
