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We as human beings typically record moments in our lives we want to remember. The good stuff, in other words. We don’t take out the camera to capture people crying or suffering quiet forms of existentialism. We do it to remember birthday parties, theme park trips, and other happy memories we’ll want to revisit. They’re time capsules meant to bring us joy we can rely on in the years to come. The world is so full of chaos that’s often impossible to comprehend. These kinds of controlled snapshots provide a reliable dose of serotonin and a way for us to feel like we have some sort of control over the world. We can now mold our visions of the past to be whatever we like.
Aftersun, the feature-length directorial debut from writer/director Charlotte Wells, opens with a perfect example of these kinds of home videos. Sophie (Frankie Corio) is clutching a camcorder and filming her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), standing out on the balcony of the hotel room they’re staying in as part of their summer trip to Turkey. She begins to ask him some questions, mocking how old he is, while also occasionally pointing the camera towards herself as she’s talking. It’s an adorable interaction, just the kind of thing any parent or child would want to remember years after a vacation ended. This is our introduction to the past in Aftersun, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg in how this movie grapples with memories and what kind of childhood events become “memorable” in adulthood.
What doesn’t the camera see?
After this prologue, Wells shifts her focus to Sophie and Calum kicking off their trip, with most of these exploits being captured in a traditional filming style rather than in-universe camerawork. Through this means, we get to see countless moments between father and daughter that are too imperfect to be seen on tape. This includes the greater context for Aftersun’s opening videotaped exchange between Sophie and Calum, which, it turns out, occurred when Calum was feeling extremely anxious and frustrated. Once Calum turns off the camera, the audience sees, through a reflection in the TV, the duo shares a much more intimate and revealing conversation regarding this father’s past.
It’s here that Calum opens up to Sophie about his tumultuous childhood and an unpleasant experience he had the day he turned eleven years old when everyone forgot it was even his birthday until he spoke about it. There’s quiet but raw emotion in this sequence, and it’s clear Sophie, at times, is struggling just to figure out how to respond to her father’s unflinching gaze back into the past. This is not something captured on the pair’s camcorder, nor is it the kind of conversation you’d put in a bunch of vacation videos destined to be shared with “interested” friends. But that doesn’t make it any less of a meaningful moment of bonding between the two characters.
In this conversation, Sophie fully sees her father as a human being, a sensation she’ll experience throughout Aftersun. It’s a moment she’ll carry well into adulthood as she tries to untangle her complicated feelings about Calum. As for Calum himself, this instance of vulnerability is a perfect representation of how our memories influence our present. Though he never says as much, it’s clear Calum’s troubled childhood has inspired him to try to be a much better dad to his daughter. He’s open with her whereas his parents were aloof. He had to speak up to get a birthday present whereas Calum is often problematically spending money on Sophie he simply doesn’t have. Calum has grave issues as a parent, but it’s also clear the memories of his tumultuous adolescence are molding his approach to his daughter.
This will not be the only way memories of the past intersect with adulthood in Aftersun.
The past is the present is the future
Midway through Aftersun, we suddenly cut to an adult woman waking up in bed with her female partner. The cry of a baby has cut through the night and inspired this lady to stir. As this woman groggily sits up, her partner offers to look after the baby. That lady who first woke up insists that she can take care of it. Her partner nuzzles her shoulder and then murmurs “Happy birthday, Sophie.” An adult version of Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) has now entered the world of Aftersun. The child we’ve seen up to this point has now become a parent herself.
There’s something incredibly bittersweet about this introduction, especially since the brief glimpse we see of Sophie here is so different from the adolescent version of the character that’s dominated Aftersun up to this point. Granted, the dead of night is not the most opportune time to get a good temperature for a person’s personality. However, the brief snippet we see of Sophie here is radically different from the precocious youngster that took a vacation with her dad in Turkey. The differences between the two is even reflected in how Sophie briefly kisses a boy on that Turkey vacation while, as an adult, she’s now committed to a woman.
Aftersun’s quiet depiction of Sophie growing up and discovering her fluid sexuality indicates how all that camcorder footage chronicles an entirely different person. Just as Sophie and Calum couldn’t have a real heart-to-heart chat until the camera was shut off, so too are all the indicators of whom this youngster will become removed from this camcorder footage. The person you pretend to be when the camera lens is on you isn’t the same person you are behind closed doors, let alone the person you’ll be years down the road. Similarly, the memories of the past rattling around in Sophie’s brain as she tends to her child aren’t the ones captured on camera.
That Turkey vacation inspired memories inside Sophie that, for better and for worse, she can’t get rid of. Her father leaving her alone and without a key to get into their hotel room, after the duo shared a tense evening of activities, is doubtlessly a traumatic memory for Sophie. Much like that fateful 11-year-old birthday did for Calum, Sophie must have that fateful night locked away in her mind as a guide for what not to do as a parent. But that quiet chat on a massive body of water, where Calum told Sophie she could tell him anything? That also unquestionably left a ripple effect on her brain.
Both these events took place over 24 hours, demonstrate the highs and lows of Sophie and Calum’s relationship, and are both occurrences you wouldn’t want to document with the camcorder. Adult Sophie may not have a physical videotape to look back on when it comes to these memories, but these wildly varying memories still left a massive impact on her psyche and helped shape her into the human being she is today.
The unforgettable conclusion to Aftersun and its exploration of memories
Aftersun ends with two revelations. The first explains recurring flashes throughout the movie depicting Calum in a crowd of dancing people set against a black backdrop. It turns out, this is an exaggerated memory in Sophie’s mind of the final night of their trip when her father beckoned her to the dance floor to sway to Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” The whole thing looks and feels, through the direction of Wells, like a dream. If camcorders offer a static, straightforward way of remembering our past, our dreams offer something much different. Here, we process our emotions and memories in more stylized terms that can, paradoxically, speak deeper to the truths hiding beneath those events from our past.
So it is with this ending that we see how Sophie processes this critical night and her relationship with her father. The striking and overwhelming nature of this place, with its flashing lights and deluge of people, reflects how overpowered Sophie felt at that moment and how daunting she finds these memories as an adult. The quick cuts alternating between adolescent and adult Sophie, meanwhile, are reminders that the drastically different grown-up experiencing these memories is the same little girl who couldn’t get back into her hotel room. A moment where Sophie pushes Calum into a black void, complete with low-angle shots of this woman’s younger and older forms, suggests that she wishes could have power over her father. He molded her life, for good and for ill. Why can’t she also exert some control over him?
After this detour into the psyche, we finally see the context for the home videos that have been peppered throughout the movie. Sophie has been watching them on her couch while her baby rests nearby. The final home video that we see is captured by Calum as he bids farewell to adolescent Sophie. It’s an adorable departure, but also one devoid of the good and bad moments off-camera that defined their vacation. If you watched this devoid of context, you’d never know everything that just happened between father and daughter in the span of a few minutes.
Wells doesn’t beat the viewer over the head with why Sophie is now gazing into the past, watching videos offer a skewed vision of yesteryear. Maybe she finds comfort in briefly living in a happier, less brutal interpretation of reality. Maybe she’s turning to these recorded memories for inspiration on how to be a parent. What’s less ambiguous is the haunting final shot suggesting Calum’s place in Sophie’s psychology as an adult. The final shot of Aftersun merges the movie’s two forms of remembering the past (camcorders and the abstract concept of memories) in depicting Calum, clutching the camcorder after saying goodbye to his daughter in the airport, turning around and walking to a large door, behind which is the dance floor from Sophie’s mind.
The symbolism is rich here, with Wells finding such vivid terms to explore the concept of memory. The complexity here also means that she doesn’t dare come down on defining Calum as either a good or bad dad. Not because there’s nothing to critique about his parenting style, but our memories of the people who raised us don’t tend to work in such binaries. They’re more complicated than what we chronicle in camcorders, social media videos, or other similar fragmented snapshots of the past. Aftersun is cognizant of how inaccurate these kinds of videos can be, but as part of its nuanced approach to reality, it’s also not dismissing everything they offer. As seen by Sophie indulging in these videos in Aftersun’s final scenes, those snippets of the past don’t paint a full picture of reality, but that doesn’t mean they’re devoid of kernels of truth or comfort.
The ramifications of camcorder footage are complicated. So is untangling the past and our relationships with the people closest to us. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean we can’t grapple with it. Aftersun embraces all that complexity to outstanding effect, in the process creating a remarkable depiction of what kind of memories mold our psyche. Such memories, as seen by the most harrowing and touching moments of Calum and Sophie’s vacation, tend to be the ones that are never captured by a camcorder.
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