Aftersun [DVD]

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The performances from Corio and Mescal are adequate but don't quite make up for the shortcomings in the script. Corio can capture Sophie's innocence and confusion as she reflects on her father's past. Mescal can also bring a sense of sadness and regret to the role, which helps make the relationship between Sophie and her father more believable. Earlier, there were signs as he danced in silence on the balcony while smoking that his mental health wasn't great because it was off-kilter, an inappropriate moment to dance in silence, and to dance oddly as if self-comforting, nearly talking to himself, but not quite. The film was released for video on demand in the United States on 20 December 2022, [23] and was later made available to stream on Mubi on 5 January 2023 in countries where Mubi distributes the film. Dalton, Ben (21 May 2022). "Mubi buys hot UK Cannes title 'Aftersun' starring Paul Mescal (exclusive)". Screen Daily. Archived from the original on 23 May 2022 . Retrieved 23 May 2022.

Grater, Tom (20 April 2022). "Cannes Critics' Week: Jesse Eisenberg's 'When You Finish Saving The World' To Open 2022 Selection". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on 20 April 2022 . Retrieved 23 May 2022.And it is the point of view and the self-imposed clipping that are also linked to subtlety and idle times. There are innumerable examples of subtle stories with dead times, but at the same time powerful. But this is not the case. The succession of placid vignettes of that stay in the hotel in the 90s, seasoned with the inevitable home videos, try to rescue a lost paradise with weak ominous shadows that immerse the viewer in a slow and at times frankly soporific story. The director Charlotte Wells offers us a morose autobiographical story where point of view, subtlety and dead times combine against her intention to convey the protagonist's nostalgia for a lost father and paradise and the inevitability of not having understood him on time. A film where the tensions between child and adult perspectives, between naivety and understanding, between experience and loss are only latent.

Like the very best art, writer/director Charlotte Wells's film MUST be seen more than once to be appreciated, fully felt and understood. Like the fragmented family it depicts, the film requires of its viewer connection, engagement, commitment.I think the 'disco shards' of memory that intervene in the film at times are adult Sophie's ongoing bombardments of puzzle pieces about her heritage - her parents' relationship that brought her into existence and what they were like ... given that at least one parent was capable of sheltering her from the full truth of his (suicidal) intentions. Sophie is unruffled by overhearing two young girls discussing their sexual activity, the sexual play of the teens she meets over a pool game, the teens' later heavy drinking, even her spotting two gay men kissing in a doorway. The latter may shade Colum's "new thing going with Keith." Matter-of-factly, she tells Colum of her having kissed young Michael. Theirs is a relationship to cherish and envy, the film’s mood increasingly poignant and elegiac as the holiday draws to a close.Clothes, colours and music combine to create a vivid sense of time and place, and there’s a haunting, ambiguous closing sequence. It’s marvellous. Mubi’s extras include a commentary from Wells and an entertaining Q&A with her and the two leads. At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (Paul Mescal). As a world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film. When a creator or creator faces a story with autobiographical elements, there is always the risk of falling into narcissism, when the memories invoked and especially the way of exposing them, are only interesting for the one who writes or films them and the nostalgia they generate is not produce resonance with the reader/spectator. Not everyone is Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante or Woody Allen or Steven Spielberg or even Joanna Hogg, to go to a more related style. And Charlotte Wells clearly isn't.