11/13/2023 0 Comments Debut video capture review![]() ![]() Plaudits to editor Blair McClendon, who juxtaposes scenes and images in almost hyperreal, dreamlike fashion, conjuring a magical space in which time seems to bend emotionally.Īppropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of Aftersun lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. It often seems as if the real story is playing out beyond the edges of the frame, dancing in the shadows beyond the confines of the screen. That tension between fact and fiction – between recorded and remembered events – draws us deep into the drama, causing us to examine every frame as if searching for clues to a hidden truth that remains tantalisingly elusive. Yet Aftersun is constructed as a very personal recollection, filtered through a haze of memory and imagination by the now-adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on things she didn’t really understand at the time. Scrappy DV-cam footage offers apparently concrete evidence of the interactions between Sophie and Calum, with both roles being performed with quite breathtaking naturalism. As for Calum, his outward calm seems to cover demons of denial a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into a more chaotic – or euphoric – existence ( Moonlightdirector and Aftersun co-producer Barry Jenkins describes Calum as “wading through wells of quiet anguish”). Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are sometimes mistaken for siblings) but she’s still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table. We meet young, separated father Calum ( Normal People’s Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the late 1990s. Don’t be fooled Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing. A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. It’s easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May. Earlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to Saint Maud ’s record-breaking performance in 2020.
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