Rated R, primarily for implications of suicide. Also, considering that this is a story about a little girl and her dad, there's a lot of swearing and drinking that goes on. Not so much that the movie is about swearing and drinking. But it is definitely present. I can't say that the movie is visibly about suicide, but the notion of suicide lingers over this entire movie. R.
DIRECTOR: Charlotte Wells I could have sworn this movie was 4:3. My brain must be playing tricks on me because I watched so many 4:3 movies in a row. Yesterday, I wrote so many blogs that I high-fived myself. But between the new episode of Picard and just a day that I can't push to find any free time to write, I'll be lucky if I can finish this one. (In the back of my brain, I'll find time to write one more, leaving too many left to write.) Aftersun was listed #1 on someone's list of best movies of the year. I feel dumb when I see that kind of stuff. Because...I got very little out of Aftersun. I think that movies like Aftersun act as a mirror. Unlike most movies, Aftersun doesn't give its audience a lot. It's more about character than something that can be described. I tried. I did. I tried explaining the plot to someone who wondered what it was about and the summary was painfully simple: a daughter goes on vacation with her father, who is depressed and he probably kills himself sometime after the vacation. I have to use words like "probably" because nothing is really concrete in this movie. I'll admit that I started getting frustrated with the movie. After all, to a certain extent, the movie is almost the equivalent of watching a stranger's vacation videos. Not much happens in the movie in terms of plot stuff. It's just the general sadness that can accompany a vacation. It's the equivalent of having an existential crisis in the middle of a wedding. So I did a quick Google search and one of the summaries claimed that not everything in this movie could be trusted. We were dealing with an unreliable narrator. To a certain extent, that is obvious. But I don't know if there is anything imagined so much as limited by the perspective of a daughter who couldn't have possibly predicted that her father was suicidal at that age. Golly, I can't believe that I have to spell this next part out, but at least it's content. Technically, nothing in this movie actually spells out that Calum kills himself. There is evidence that he does, especially the scene of him crying by himself in his room and that he falls asleep on the bed. Also, the fact that adult Sophie looks back on this vacation with overwhelming sadness. Look, I'm spelling something out for you that is right there on the screen. But I have nothing smart to say, so who cares? See everything I'm typing? Digital real estate that I'm just laying claim to. Yeah, that dude totally committed suicide (and, in hindsight, I should be more sympathetic) and the story is about a girl looking back on her father's death. So, if I'm such a guy with Dead Dad issues (talk to my friends about how much I play that card and you would be mortified), why am I not moved by this story? That should be me up on that screen! I should be experiencing full on sympathy. There's an element to this movie that makes me feel needy as heck and I don't like that about myself. The movie, in an attempt to allow the audience to craft its own story, leaves me hanging with almost nothing to work with. I know. I'm alone in that. It's A24 non-horror distilled. Everything is up to interpretation. But I am now thinking when everything is up for interpretation, almost nothing is a valid look at the movie. If anything, my interpretation is that the moment before death is the calm before the storm. This vacation looks a little crummy. Everything just feels a little bit off. (I mean, sure, it's a family all inclusive --I assume --in Turkey during the '80s or '90s. How good can it be?) But it's not like this is a story about a great relationship that Sophie has with her dad. If anything, Dad --like in real life --is there as a glorified chaperone. I know that Paul Mescal is up for an Academy Award for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor. In the scenes where he's breaking down or barely keeping it together, I completely agree. I suppose that's true for a lot of movies that the performance can be chalked up to one or two scenes. But with this movie, Calum is almost painfully stoic. There's not a lot there. I don't really know what to say about him except that he is a dad. He seems to love his kid, but in the same way that most dads love their kids. I get that he's special to Sophie, but Sophie is doing a lot of the emotional and vulnerable lifting. I'll talk about a scene that should have absolutely destroyed me and it didn't do much: the karaoke scene. Sophie, in an attempt to continue a family tradition, surprises her father by submitting their names to sing. Dad cops out and Sophie sings very poorly by herself. Okay, there's a lot telling there and I regret making this whole setup. That scene should have destroyed me. It could have been about this moment where we see a dad's tank drained. It was about depression and how we can't always be the people we want to be in that moment. But I didn't really see that much of a shift in Calum from the beginning. It seems that a lot of Calum is about a very thin facade of what a person should be. Maybe that's the message of depression. I just keep staring at this movie and wondering who gave this guy a kid to take care of. (The answer: The Lord.) Now, I'm letting my own mental health just be shaming people, but I'm trying to get to a point. From an outside perspective, this is just a sad vacation. I guess from Sophie's perspective, this was a happy way to say goodbye to her dad, but it didn't change the sorrow that she has for the passing of her dad. (Her dad committed suicide! We need to make peace with that!) But the entire movie just feels like vanilla. It's intentional vanilla. It's so obsessed with the audience imbuing meaning on this vacation that it doesn't really have the meat of other movies about dads dying. I mean, heck, I guess Aftersun and The Whale have so much in common in that respect. But let's talk about The Whale and how the value of honestly gives us something to talk about. From moment one in The Whale, we know that Charlie is facing his own mortality. He's going to die within the week. Heck, he should die by the end of the day, but it's through the majesty of Hollywood cinema that he survives until the end of the movie. Ellie (whose name sounds eerily like Sophie...) is aware of Charlie's near death and the film becomes about closure. But Aftersun says that closure be darned. (I went this far without swearing, I mind as well continue the trend.) Sophie is a husk at in the present timeline. It's almost like the most vanilla vacation in the world would make her live a sadder version of that lifestyle. I don't know. I know that people love this movie and I'm the oddball who got so incredibly bored by it, despite lots of neuroses that involve dead fathers. I want that confrontation to happen between Calum and Sophie. Instead, it's a lot of snipping and a lot of general happiness. It becomes about the visuals of having a girl handle a camera, capturing microaggressions that may be indicative of a deep depression that might be leading to a suicide. But there's none of that. There's no major blowout. There's no things coming to a head. It's a zit that just stays beneath the surface. To the movie's credit, that's probably more realistic than what happens in the movies. But sometimes I need the movies to do the things that I don't have the guts to do. I get it. I preach verisimilitude. I get that people's processes shoudl be different. But there's abstract and then there's watching paint dry. I suppose that there are things that I'm actively ignoring. It also probably hurts that I just watched two very cinematic movies about mortality and loss that to transition into something that lets me put my own meaning over it might come across as boring. It's just that I was bored. I hate that I was bored, but I was quite bored. I needed something. Anything. I loved that we saw Calum break down. But that wasn't Sophie's story. That was about the repression of mental health and it almost felt like it was just cruel to watch this guy suffer by himself for the sake of a movie. I don't know. It's probably way better than I gave it credit for. But I didn't care for Aftersun. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
October 2024
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