Something odd happened to me during a recent press screening of "Aftersun," a beautifully sculpted and quietly shattering first feature from the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells. While jotting down a few stray thoughts and details, I turned a page in my notebook and came across a drawing, something my 6-year-old daughter had doodled in bright-orange crayon. That wasn't odd in and of itself; notebooks get passed around our house like potato-chip bags. But it was the first time the discovery of her handiwork, usually a cute and funny mid-screening distraction, had the effect of nudging me closer to the two characters in front of me — who, it may not surprise you to learn, are a girl and her father.
My apologies for the indulgent personal intro, something I've allowed myself only because the process of picking through one's personal baggage — including the scribbled notes and stray memorabilia our loved ones leave for us — feels entirely germane to what Wells herself is doing. "Aftersun," opening in theaters after an acclaimed festival run that began at Cannes this year, is what the director calls an "emotionally autobiographical" work, inspired by her recollections of a summer vacation she and her father took together in the '90s. It's a memory piece and, as such, a rumination on the ways in which memories can be at once indelible and imprecise, how they can torment us and fail us and still be the most precious things — maybe even the only things — we have left.
From the opening moments, rendered in the grainy textures of camcorder footage, Wells makes explicit the patient, methodical act of sifting and sorting, of peering with intense concentration into the past. But then the past comes suddenly into focus with a shimmering, almost hyper-real clarity. The sun blazes down on the pools and deck chairs of a budget resort in Turkey, where 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her 30-something single dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), have come for a late-summer holiday. The hotel isn't much — the tackiness of the lobby furniture, speaking of memories, will emblazon itself on your retina — but Sophie and Calum take most of their setbacks and letdowns in stride. They have the easy adaptability of two people who are pleasant and undemanding by nature and, it soon becomes clear, a little disoriented in each other's company.
