Originally, there is a photo found, that of a six-year-old child by the pool of a small hotel in Spain. On arrival, there is Aftersun, a real gem of cinema, a film so beautiful and so melancholy that it is difficult to analyze at the risk of breaking its fragile balance. But Charlotte Wells’ intimate feature film seduces everything and everything the world on its way since its first confidential screenings at Critics’ Week in Cannes. He has even just opened the door to the Oscars for Paul Mescal, whose first leading role in the cinema. How did the young Scottish director manage to create such a personal and yet universal work that upsets, in very different places, each spectator who discovers it? head and especially in the heart since its discovery in Cannes in May 2022. See also on Konbini“I found a photo of me, I must have been five or six years old, and I was sitting by a swimming pool in Spain. Behind me was a very beautiful woman and I wondered who the real subject of the photo was. It sparked an idea and I saw a potential story between a very young father and his daughter. It was a much more fictional idea than the film I finally made, which is above all a quest for memories, but which has the same heart. holiday film between Calum, a divorced father in his thirties, and Sophie, his 11-year-old daughter, on the Turkish coast in the late 1990s, which also takes on the air of a coming-of-age movie, dark and sunny at the same time. Swimming pool, diving, ice cream and karaoke, their holidays seem sweet and placed under the sign of a sincere father-daughter love. But the story of their week is interspersed with images that they filmed, in turn, with the little family camcorder, and which remind Sophie, now an adult and in turn a mother, of this adored but elusive father whom she will have, in vain, tried to capture during this week of vacation, which we imagine will be their last, by through a camera, a photo, a television, a reflection in a mirror or on a window, but which will remain irremediably nebulous. In Cannes, the rise of Paul Mescal that we expected Paul Mescal, revealed thanks to the role of Connell Waldron in the sublime serial adaptation of the eponymous novel by Sally Rooney Normal People and who in just twelve episodes has become the fictional male ideal of the moment, who embodies this loving but imperfect young father. In the BBC series, the then unknown actor was filmed in all his rough edges, doubts and weaknesses, blending positive masculinity and erotic potential to perfection. Under the camera of Charlotte Wells, melancholy and ambivalence manage to penetrate this Greek statue physique. “Calum is at his best when he is with Sophie. He’s a good dad, but he’s not perfect. He fails to let his suffering out of his relationship with his daughter. Paul has an innate warmth and a physique that I found perfect for the role. I’m extremely excited to see him in Gladiator. I told him that if Ridley Scott ever got tired of directing him, I would be there to help him.”Small details for great emotionFaithful to her raw material, Charlotte Wells thought of her film as a photo album, an accumulation of moments of life, without any real linearity, where emotion is nestled in tiny details, an envious look from Sophie on games between older teenagers, a Polaroid that develops or the cast on Calum’s arm, which he removes, alone, in the bathroom in one of the many scenes of the film which, without really understanding why, we were overwhelmed with emotion. which made up my first draft script and which I spread over seven days. This is how I saw the emergence of small narrative arcs that built this emotion which is a matter of mystery. This deliberate accumulation of details that takes us towards this form of expression of pain, it is something that I had undertaken in my short films and which moreover serves the short format better. with joy and smiles, by small, almost imperceptible touches, Charlotte Wells draws, between the lines of her summer memories, a darker portrait of this father who is ambivalent but entirely devoted to his daughter. In a spat at his reflection in the mirror, a confession to his daughter, “honestly, I do not see myself reaching 40 years old”, a fit of tears or a word of apology, we guess a malaise that halos the story with a melancholy that made our tears well up at unexpected moments, until the emotional climax, yet a simple dance scene in a nightclub. Between the lines of strobe lights that intermittently illuminate a Calum transcended by “ Under Pressure” by Queen and Bowie, Sophie tries, in a final attempt, to remember this loving father who nevertheless abandoned her in the room of their small hotel to go dancing 20 years earlier. “It is fascinating for me to see viewers take different paths through the film. I think it’s because there’s space for everyone to bring their personal experience to it and fill in the blanks in their own way.” Because Aftersun is not a declaration of love or loathing to the father, nor even a history of transmission. It is a film of benevolent but mysterious ghosts and happy memories which nevertheless leave traces on the parents that we will become in our turn and which knew how to capture, with a rare delicacy, a moment of tragic rocking.
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