Sous le soleil

I have two daughters and recently got divorced. I know how it hurts to put on a fake smile while deep inside your heart is bleeding. As a father, a man, you try to look strong and resilient, to keep your children worry-free, but every time the girls are not around you feel like an empty shell. This movie made me cry because I know how it feels to be Callum. I know how hard it is to leave your precious children behind and to be torn away from your family. Leaving behind beautiful memories and slowly drifting apart from your loved ones. It's very hard to move on and I hope to experience better days in the future.

This film crept up on me. I was worried it was a gimmicky art film (plus at the beginning the dialogue was hard to decipher) but as the film went on I was swept up in it - purely down to Paul Mescal's and Francesca Corio's performances. Achingly beautiful. I was crying without realising and also on the tube home - the tears just kept coming but it was nothing to do with me.

Alison Willmore from Vulture at New York Magazine perfectly articulated what I felt :' It's about wanting to reach across time, and to meet a loved one in an impossible space where, for once, you're both on the same level, and you can finally understand them for who they are - or who they were.'

I almost never watch films twice but 'Aftersun' was a rare case where I absolutely had to. I don't think this film can be fully appreciated on first watch. I saw someone suggest that after you watch it your mind will go back to little moments and re-evaluate their significance, and it will. But watching it again with the full picture gives the entire movie a different perspective. The second watch is almost like watching a different film.

Kids in films, particularly in lead roles, can often be very annoying. That isn't an issue here. Frankie Corio gives one of the most likeable child performances I can ever remember seeing. Her chemistry with Paul Mescal was amazing. I read that she wasn't privy to Mescal's solo scene rehearsals, so that she wasn't fully aware of what his character was going through, much the same as her character Sophie wasn't. That's brilliant.

Something that was very apparent on second viewing was the significance of the music in the movie. The first time through I remember thinking, "there are a lot of good songs in this movie". On second viewing you realise that every song used is telling a story. It's telling you what is going on, but like most people in the real world, we just hear a banging song and nod our head to it. Then later on we reconsider its true meaning.

Finally, this film has one of the beast movie endings I can remember seeing. It's classy, heavy and thoughtful all at once. It's done in a beautiful and somewhat haunting way that will stick with me for a long time. 9.5/10.

After watching this beautiful film and coming across a little note from the amazing storyteller Charlotte Wells:

(I cannot share URL apparently so please search "A note from Charlotte Wells from the site of A24.")

This was the word that broke me down. Hasret.

I just couldn't resist my tears. As a Turkish person, its just both amazing and heartbreaking from the point of view of the director that this word resonates with her feelings from a place she had this holiday with her late father. That it stuck with her...

Even though it is not the same case at all, I remember the times as a kid I closed the door on my dad because he would come home late from work. That because he would promise me to come home early.

Now, today I can't even imagine how saddening it was for him at those times and it wasn't even at his hands.

Hopefully I will be able to share my love and gratitude my parents as Charlotte did here with such elegance through some way. Since, it's not easy to recapture feeling this instant or in any...

Thank you for this film all in all, it surely made me reconsider a lot recently...

You have a video of a holiday in the past, when you were young, before life's burdens had amassed, with a father you adore, likes to take to the dancefloor, though he's generally withdrawn and quite downcast. A reflection of a time when eyes were new, interpretation was a seed, as yet to grow, but when you look back now, it's a different world somehow, revealing spaces not yet entered, or sought to go.

It's a slow meander, beautifully filmed, with two incredible performances, although those two highlights alone don't create a piece that takes your breath away as much as you might like, until you sit down to reflect, and absorb what you've seen through your own eyes.