Read the film review with Paul Mescal

The challenge before Paul Meskal in Thereaftern is not small: in the skin of Calum, the father of the youthful Sophie (Frankie Corio), he must make the viewer feel connected to a man he doesn’t really know—or, in the broadest definition, he only knows in parts and pieces, through the eyes of his daughter who Calum willfully and painfully stays away from certain aspects of your life. So what the actor is practicing here is the art of expressing himself without words, of making himself understandable without the dramaturgical device of presentation.

Luckily for us, Mescal is brilliant at his job. The secret is the naturalness of his charisma, which goes against the grain of Hollywood’s megarehearsed film stars and makes him compulsively “watchable”. The way Mescal moves through the scenes, the marks of parental strain on her body, the directions her quietly anguished gaze flees when her daughter inadvertently presses on a sensitive spot… all of this is not lost on the viewer, both because of the director Charlotte Wells is dedicated to registering these nuances and why Mescal makes them impossible to miss. With eyes fixed on him, we understand him even without knowing him.

That’s the whole Crucis of Aftersun, so to speak. By cutting and pasting Sophie’s memories (as an adult Celia RowlsonHall) about the holidays he spent with his father at the age of 11, the film gradually materializes in front of the viewer as an elegiac poem about the essential abyss of our parents. Semiprotected by definition from their ugliest parts, but unable to maintain the superheroic vision we had of them in childhood, we gradually, in spirit if not in heart, turn them into strangers — even if they are strangers to whom we are very intimate .

This heartbreaking contradiction does not lessen the daughter’s love for her father, nor the father’s love for his daughter. Aftersun sparkles on the golden photo from Gregory Oke and in the impressionistic montage of Blair McClendon, with the purest affection and empathy. The bits we see of Calum’s agony, whether witnessed or extrapolated by Sophie, only make us more fond of the character, more mourning his blurred absence guiding the daughter’s adult life, at least in the brief flashes we see of her . Calum the man appears tragic to us only because of the parts of himself he circumcises.

Hence the clever use of framing, which fragments the character’s body and hides it in shadows, mirrors, TV screens, or within the confines of the camera’s field of view. Like the protagonists of Sweetie (1989), a classic by jane campion, this technique serves not to depersonalize Calum, but to understand his need to put himself in pieces, eternally incomplete, in the world, even (perhaps especially) in front of those he loves most. Without spoiling the Aftersun revelations, it’s worth noting that this is a condition that many viewers will identify with.

Hence the way Wells structures his film, turning the good old threeact scheme into a sort of feverish crescent of stifled conflict and secrets peeking through the crack in the door. The task of text and editing is rather to cushion the shock between the almost suffocating intimacy of the excerpts shot as if in home videos and the passages set in delirious scenarios that allow an imaginative stroll between past and present. Finally, he bridges the gap between an emotional attempt to simulate reality and the theatrical detachment that allows truths about it to be revealed.

If there’s one thing to say against Aftersun, it’s that the hard work of connecting doesn’t always go smoothly. At times, Well’s film seems to complicate what doesn’t need to be that difficult, including layers of aestheticization that, instead of helping to communicate with the viewer, get in the way. But even if defined as autobiographical by the director herself, Aftersun evades egocentricity and aims for the universal. It is a generous and, above all, profoundly true film about the unfathomable and special in the human experience of those whose lives are intertwined with ours.