Aftersun (2022 | UK | 98 minutes | Charlotte Wells)
A pervasive sadness lingers at the corners of Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’s accomplished recollection of a father-daughter holiday in Turkey. Bookended by a sleepless adult woman watching digital video clips from her childhood vacation while her new new baby occasionally stirs in the distance, most of the entrancing film plays out in memory. The setting is a seemingly idyllic vacation in the 1990s when Hot Single Dad (Paul Mescal) has taken his daughter Sophie to a nice-enough resort to cap her school holidays. The dreamy realism of memory are occasionally punctuated by flashes of stroboscopic scenes in a (possibly) imagined club depict adult Sophie (maybe) recognizing her father’s dance moves in the crowd.
Introducing the film’s surprise screening at the festival, Barry Jenkins warned the audience to prepare to weep and was admittedly discombobulated after seeing it himself for the sixth time. One of the film’s producers (and longtime Telluride participant), he returned to conduct a Q&A with director and lead actor. His introduction set a mood, but the power of the film is less in sentimental melodrama than the implied mystery that Wells steadfastly refuses to explain. Aside from a few logistical bumps along the way and the resort being perhaps less posh than expected, the trip itself plays out — at least in memory — as some approximation of an ideal getaway. Mescal plays Calum, on the verge of his thirty-second birthday, as a supremely competent and sensitive young father to a recently-eleven-year-old daughter (a remarkably poised debut from Frankie Corio). They spend days by the pool under crystal clear blue skies dotted with drifting parasailers, snap photos of each other underwater, pal up for snorkeling day trips where tiny fish swim just below the surface, and have dinners together at the resort.
Amid these parental bonding events, Sophie also experiences the beginnings of a chaste romance with a boy she meets at the arcade and dips her toes into the more sophisticated waters of teen rebellion when she’s welcomed into a clique of older kids at the pool tables. Handheld video clips contrast the maturity that Sophie grants herself in memory with the more innocent, less polished child captured in her own recordings. In the grainy overexposed clip that opens the film, she tries to interview her dad about what he imagined for himself at her age, he just can’t answer. While the framing and tone suggest an anticipation for something to go very wrong, we never get to see what it is.
Like Sophie, we find ourself eagerly searching the corners of her memory for clues. Callum’s moods are rarely erratic, but oddities and possible hints of sadness hover at the edge of the frame. An early long shot finds him smoking alone on the balcony to the gentle sounds of his sleeping daughter’s breaths. He begins the trip wearing a cast for a wrist that he can’t remember breaking. He does occasional Tai-Chi practice and embarrasses his daughter with silly dance moves (it’s an A24 release, so expect a meaningful dance scene or two set to an impeccable 1990s soundtrack). Although he’s still on good terms with Sophie’s mom, he expresses no sentiments about returning to their hometown. His mood occasionally flags, one night he opts out of karaoke, goes up to the room early and forgets to give Sophie the key. Slight lapses or curiosities that could easily be waved away, yet the film’s mood heightens each with the intense sense of detective work of an adult voraciously reinterpreting childhood memories with world-weary eyes.
The achievement is both in the performances by Mescal and Corio as well as the exceptional editing that interweaves these recollections. Mescal easily slides into the role of a young father, unsettled in life while striving to project confidence, with introspective grace. Some will certainly be frustrated by the lack of direct resolutions or unveiled explanations, but for me (perhaps primed by the Jenkins endorsement) the elliptical nature of puzzling together memories, faded artifacts, and imagination made for a deeply effective experience that will nag at the heart for quite some time.
Close (2022 | Belgium | 105 minutes | Lukas Dhont)
Earlier in the festival I rallied for a trip up the gondola to the Chuck Jones theater. There, I caught Cannes Grand Prix winner Close, which is far more explicit about losses, their inciting causes, and their lingering painful aftermath. In his follow-up to Girl, Lukas Dhont presents a tragedy of toxic masculinity and its insidious effects on a teenage friendship in rural Belgium. Opening in the waning days of golden-lighted summer before the beginning of sixth grade, Leo and Remi are inseparable. Spindly framed, they play pretend war games in the woods outside Leo’s family farm, sprinting home through vibrant flower fields, all laughter and gawky limbs. Perpetual sleepovers find them platonically sharing a bed, the unabashed proximity all the better to sweetly whisper awkward stories to stop each other’s racing minds and allow a little sleep.
It’s a chaste yet idyllic pairing. Remi’s an oboe player and Leo imagines the two of them going on a world tour in support of his outstanding musicianship. Each are integrated into the other’s family and they think of themselves as brotherly best friends. Yet as school starts, Leo is more keenly attuned to the ways that their closeness draws attention and stokes assumptions. As he begins to craft an independent identity for himself through other kids, taking on the unlikeliest task of becoming a hockey player, and dedicating himself to the work of his family’s farm the increasing distance takes its toll on Remi’s psyche and their friendship. As the gulf between them yawns tragically wider, the success of the film hangs almost entirely on the delicate and expressive features of its breakout star Eden Dambrine. A trained dancer before being cast for the role by Dhont, he brings a precision to a role that reflects the reticence of boys to talk about their feelings. Instead of words, his work is in the eyes and the monotonous physicality of forcing oneself forward with the tasks of life. Much of it plays like a choreographed performance that’s nevertheless lyrical and heartbreaking.
One Fine Morning (2022 | France | 112 minutes | Mia Hansen-Løve)
My final film of the festival was One Fine Morning, where the key disappearance in question plays out in the the grinding slow-motion of real life. Lea Seydoux plays Sandra, a widowed translator raising her young daughter in a small Parisian apartment. Her divorced father, a philosophy professor (Pascal Greggory), has recently been diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition that requires more and more supervision than his daughters or longtime companion can provide. While she, her mother, and sister negotiate the unpleasant complexities of finding a place for him to live, she reconnects with an old friend (an adventuring cosmo-chemist played by Melvil Poupaud) and sets off an adulterous spark.
In the grief of her husband’s death and the necessity of caring for her smart and well-adjusted daughter, Sandra had closed off the potential for romance in her life. So over the course of the film, the deeply sensual couplings by two telegenic actors provide escape — for characters and audiences alike — from the cruel mundanities of family obligations even as they introduce new forms of drama and heartbreak. Like affairs of the heart, the procedures for securing eldercare for her declining father are rarely straightforward. The small peaks and valleys of each unfold in parallel, with small successes and crushing little setbacks. While there are few moments of great triumph in a story of complicated relationships and terminal diagnoses, again and again Mia Hansen-Løve flexes her particular genius for finding the profound in pedestrian rhythms of life. Here, she stares into the inevitable abyss of aging with a resigned, but not defeated, sigh.
Header image courtesy A24. A24 expects to release Aftersun on October 21st; Close (A24) and One Fine Morning (Sony Pictures Classics) don’t yet have release dates.