With her first feature film, Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells tells us how the images we keep from our childhood they can configure the ideas (and the gaps) we have about the most loved ones. In ‘after sun’, with two protagonists that you cannot stop looking at, nostalgia is configured as an exercise destined to find the reasons for our origins. For many, like the magazine ‘Fotogramas’, the best movie of last year. For the author of this article, the film with The best ending we’ve seen in recent times.
When one agrees to tell absolute truths, especially in the fields related to fiction, it is better to heal in health and put before the affirmation that one is willing to drop the adverb “perhaps”. For example: (perhaps) it was Billy Wilder who best masked a drama as comedy, I’m talking, of course, about Apartment and that apparently bland character of Bud Buxter (Jack Lemmon) who was just as bland as the film was comedy.
Something similar is what Scottish Charlotte Wells achieves with her first feature film. Already from your poster After sun seems like an easy movie instagrameable, straight to the silly heart of maudlin. Either with a polarized image, or with a filter, or from some imprecise moment between the nineties and two thousand, when we were still children who later reached adulthood with the advent of social networks. In those years, as the co-star girl, we were beginning to wake up to adolescence. We retain a memory from then that is clearer than that of early childhood, but still exempt from the aridity of adolescence. Thus, the film is dressed as an exercise in false nostalgia through a common story: the memories that an adult woman has about a vacation twenty years ago with her father in Turkey. These memories are flashing across the screen, many through the video camera with which a very young father, Calum (Paul Mescal), wants to retain the moments of happiness of his daughter, who is on the verge of leaving the childhood. Guided tours, Arcade machines, extra beds, pool games…the middle-class boast that most of us can remember. In the midst of so much commonplace, the music, which, like the film, is only apparently innocent, works as a lever to understand that everything is just a shell. For not being superficial, it is not even the Macarena (yes, “give your body joy”, the same), far from it Losing my Religionrequested by a preteen in a karaoke in which she will end up singing alone.
The girl, Sophie, played by Frankie Corio, reminds us and doesn’t remind us of that memorable performance by Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls. It is a version, yes, more in line with current morality. Until her role, throughout the footage, changes. Who is taking care of whom? Who is more vulnerable? The girl who leaves childhood or the father we hardly know anything about? Sophie, an adult, reviews the recordings. She searches for her father with a yearning that reaches the viewer, a real, analogical uncertainty, belonging to a time when home videos were intimate and close, far from the current unnecessary publicity. Like good people, good movies are worth more for what they are silent about. And the good actors. Mescal frequently appears out of focus, out of shot, against the light in the devastating scene of his birthday or in the reflection of a refracted window on the bulging television screen of the time, which also shows what is recorded by the ubiquitous handheld camera.
It is here when nostalgia ceases to be what it was and, through its cracks, the light and darkness of a character we know little or nothing about. Or of which we only know what is important, what is necessary. A father too young to have an 11-year-old daughter. A father who compulsively dances in the dark and whom we only see in the flashes of a discotheque. Will we know who he is? Why do you want to record everything? Why does he cry inconsolably and with his back to the director’s gaze? Maybe we will find out. (maybe) After sun It has the best ending we’ve seen in recent times.
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