Aftersun
“It’s not recording. I’ll just record it in my little mind camera.”
It's impossible to completely understand someone before you lose them. There will be people you love who will exit your life, one way or another, before you can complete your arc with them. But the more time you get to spend with that person, the more material you have to figure out who they were and what you meant to them. Unfortunately you don't always get that time, and Aftersun paints the struggle of trying to make sense of incomplete memories in order to cope with loss. You can replay every single echo of someone but it will never be a conversation, you'll never directly get that answer, and all you're left with is yourself.
Every single part of this movie comes together in order to portray this. Sophie's memories of the last vacation she took with her dad are handled by two titanic performances. Paul Mescal hits all the notes of a father trying to keep it together for his daughter while unable to see any future for himself. Frankie Corio makes eleven year old Sophie come alive as a funny, curious, little girl who can catch glimpses of what's going on but is still shielded by her childhood. The camera is an extension of her, lingering on mundane curiosities like flirting teenagers and distant parachuters, while occasionally only showing her dad, Calum, in peripheral shots or reflections as a way to emphasize the distance between what she can see of his true vulnerability. The editing keeps everything understated, nothing is overly dramatic, because it truly never was. There is a single fade in this that is so heartbreaking and disturbing, it's never left my mind since I first watched it. The needle drops somehow both fit the lazy UK holiday tone and the thematic undertones, including forever altering "Under Pressure" for me until the day I die.
There's a strange part of this where it feels like I'm looking both backwards and forwards while watching it. I want to recontextualize everything I've ever experienced with my parents, from the moment I realized they were their own people with deep inner lives. I, luckily, don't share the exact same experience here with Sophie, but there's still many incomplete parts of the relationship I have with my own parents that I've never really been able to understand. However, the more terrifying part of this is how Aftersun makes me look forward. Calum is not an unrelateable character and all the empathizing I could do with him begins to hurt every time I watch this. It makes me think of what parenthood could look like for me, if I even would want, and I suspect the relevance of this will never wane.
It's a perfect movie. It's one of the greatest films of all time. I strongly believe that the most effective pieces of art are those that use every part of their medium in a way that it could never be adapted into anything else. Aftersun needs to be a movie, it could never be anything but a movie. Nothing I've seen has captured the essence of memory and its affects on us in the long term quite like this, and I'd be okay if nothing again ever will.