YNOT at the Movies

Although everyone's memories about childhood, parents, and family are different, they are all precious, nostalgic, and personal. Often associated with what has been lost in the past, they may have an undercurrent of sadness and repentance, even if they are seemingly happy. The Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells's impressive feature directorial debut "Aftersun" (UK/USA 2022 | 96 min.) strikingly captures the magical flow of memories that are saturated with emotions. It's a poetic collage of her autobiographical reflection on her father. The film brings the audience back to the '90s and provokes your own memory collections about your loved ones and the adolescent years.

Besides playing music such as those from R.E.M., the film takes us back to the '90s with the low resolution images from the then-popular gadget—video recorder. The person who is viewing the recording is the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who is in a same-sex relationship and having her own child. The recording documents many small, often goofy, moments during a vacation with her 31-year-old dad Calum (Paul Mescal) in Turkey when Sophie (Frankie Corio) was eleven years old.

As if Sophie suddenly remembers all the details, the images become clear and vivid on the screen. Her time spent with her dad on the sun-kissed budget resort gradually unfolds. After Sophie's parents divorced, she has been living with her mom in Scotland. Her tai-chi practicing laid-back dad Calum lives in England. This trip to a Turkey's tourist town serves as an opportunity for the two to catch up and reconnect.

There isn't anything significant happening at the resort, and the father and daughter enjoy leisurely hours at the pool deck, as well as at the pool table with other teenage tourists. Bit by bit, we are drawn into these two and wonder what is going to happen between them as time passes. As the coming-of-age Sophie takes in the world with her eyes wide open, Calum grows more mysterious in the film. An unsettling sense of sadness simmers along the way accompanied by the soundtrack of '90s hit songs.

The director Charlotte Wells nicely captures the essence of how our memories about our loved ones linger in our heads. Some of them are clear; some of them are fuzzy; some of them are barely hanging on; and some of them are on the fence between being factual and imaginative. That's how memories work, and she conveys that peculiarity in a visual poem with her film, and the terrific Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio deliver every single line of the poem perfectly under her direction.

The camera is sometimes explicitly positioned to make the person speaking in the frame off centered, as if peeking into something that happened in the corner of the memory. It resembles how our mind works in picking up small details, either consciously or unconsciously, from the daily interaction with our loved ones. Yet nevertheless, those memories accumulate into a nostalgic album of images that imprint in our brain we hold on to dearly.

However, the film's poetic style and the lack of a clear narrative may pose a challenge for some viewers.

"Aftersun" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, October 28, 2022.