by Boen Wang
Aftersun is the best movie I’ve seen in years. Sitting in the theater as the credits rolled, in the brief contemplative moment before I took off my glasses, put on my coat, shouldered my backpack, and emerged from the darkness to endure the hour-long train ride from Lower Manhattan to Central Brooklyn, I felt something that a piece of culture—a movie, a book, an album, a video game—hasn’t produced in me for years.
It’s the feeling my wife Grace had in college when they sat in front of the poetry section at a used bookstore in Saratoga Springs, pulling slim collections off the shelves and devouring them cover-to-cover, not knowing who won the Nobel Prize and who was obscure and unknown. It’s the feeling my friend had in high school when he used his what.cd account (RIP) to torrent entire discographies of indie bands as sweet, sweet, uncompressed FLAC files.
It’s the same feeling I had when I lived alone for the first time, as a junior at Penn State in a single dorm, the walls taped floor to ceiling with topographical maps I found from the geology department, a short walk from the library where I’d roam the second-floor collection of Criterion DVDs, shelves upon shelves of them, entire histories of world cinemas waiting for me to take home, pop open, and slot into my laptop’s disc drive.
You know what I’m talking about, right? The expansiveness, the wonderment, the sense that there is simply no end to what you can see and discover and experience, the infinity of youth that Aftersun’s 11-year-old protagonist Sophie feels as she lazes about a Turkish resort with her estranged 30-year-old father, Calum.
When I called Grace to tell them about Aftersun, they asked if Calum was Good Dad or Bad Dad. I hesitated, and said he was Loving And Trying His Best But Ultimately His Best Isn’t Enough Dad. His tenderness and care are so physically evident, in the comfort and casual warmth father and daughter show towards one another. In a visually striking shot, the two of them lounge on pool chairs on the lower third of the screen, the sky above them streaked by paragliders cartwheeling across the blue.
That’s the sort of sublime filmmaking that produced The Feeling in a way that, for example, Petite Maman didn’t, which I watched with Grace and our mutual friend at a multiplex that stood on what was once the largest steel mill in the world and site of one of the deadliest battles in US labor history, and is now a shopping complex with a Costco/Target/Aldi/Starbucks/etc.—a movie that, when we discussed it at a dive bar on the other side of the Monongahela, we all agreed was fine. It was fine. It’s a supernatural story, where a little girl befriends a girl her age who turns out to be her recently deceased grandmother, but it’s shot/edited/paced in a way that is workmanlike and drained of magic, in a way that feels very deliberate and controlled and, ultimately, kinda boring.
But wait, that’s the word: magic. That’s what I’ve missed for so long. That’s what it felt like to watch Calum practice tai chi alone in a hotel room, perfectly framed so that he slides in and out of the edges of the screen, the drone of the fan mingling with the atmospheric, cello-inflected drone of Oliver Coates’ soundtrack. That’s the feeling that rumbled in my subconscious as we see Sophie and Calum gently argue in the reflection of a dead CRT monitor in an elegant unbroken take, a long take without the showiness of a director like Cuarón or Iñárritu, a take that feels more like a line of poetry than a self-indulgent run-on sentence (like this one).
Magic is what emerges from the delicate interweaving of the film’s three narrative threads. The primary storyline, where Sophie enjoys the sumptuous nothing of summer vacation while delicately navigating and ultimately exposing the cracks in her relationship with her father, is framed by an adult Sophie (now the same age Calum was) living with her partner and taking care of her newborn child. The contrast is stark: child Sophie’s world is sun-drenched and gauzy, while adult Sophie never ventures beyond the dimly lit walls of her home.
Existing somewhere within and beyond the past and present is a recurring scene of adult Sophie lost in some sort of rave or dance club, one that seems to exist beyond this mortal plane, searching for her father among the anonymous revelers. As a rule, club scenes in movies are boring. DJ, thumping music, huge crowd, characters screaming at the top of their lungs—they’re all the same. I saw my friend perform at a club in Homewood recently, a converted auto shop with no AC that unintentionally doubled as a sauna, and only Aftersun’s rave scene, in its abstraction and dreaminess/nightmarishness, captures both the transcendence and terror of being locked in a room with ear-splitting music and sweaty party-goers: the simultaneous desire to fling off corporeality and become an entity made entirely of motion and sound, and the desperate need to cling onto a sense of self.
But as Sophie searches for Calum in the club, it’s clear from the childhood scenes that he’s already gone. Calum is a child, which is why he and Sophie get along so well; at one point a teenage boy confuses them for brother and sister. That’s how they behave most of the time—sharing sarcastic jokes, pulling stunts like throwing bread at a group of cheesy performers before bolting from their dinner table—bursts of fun that belie the fact that Calum is clearly not equipped to be a father.
It all comes to a head in a devastating scene where Calum refuses to sing karaoke with Sophie, leaving her to get on stage and joylessly work her way through REM’s “Losing My Religion” by herself. I love a karaoke scene where the singer is terrible (Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues has a scene where the protagonist is so off-key it’s actually moving), and Aftersun’s is made all the more excruciating by how long it goes on for. We see the performance from both Calum’s perspective, with a long-shot of Sophie from the crowd, and her perspective, with a POV shot of the lyrics on the karaoke screen (“I think I thought I saw you try / But that was just a dream”).
It’s upsetting to watch Calum throw a tantrum, and it’s this dual perspective that produces the film’s central tension. Like Minari, Aftersun is the work of a child trying to imagine the inner life of their parent(s): in a shot that evokes Sophie alone on stage, we slowly zoom in on Calum from above as a crowd of fellow tourists led by Sophie sing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” on his 31st birthday. It’s a bleak image that undercuts the joy one should supposedly feel on their birthday: Calum standing alone in the sun, looking deeply uncomfortable as we push in on him, before we cut to Calum alone in his hotel room the night before, sobbing to himself.
What unifies child Sophie living through her vacation and adult Sophie reflecting on her memories is a MiniDV camcorder the two of them use to film their trip. The first shot of Aftersun is low-res camcorder footage of Sophie waving goodbye to her father at the airport, filmed from Calum’s perspective. We then rewind all the way to the beginning of the vacation, the screen disintegrating into a mass of glitched-out pixels.
Can I talk about how much I love low-quality video? The harshness and unpretentiousness of late 90s/early 2000s digital cameras somehow makes reality feel more real, which is maybe why Gen Z is digging up their parents’ old CyberShot point-and-shoots. At a talk I attended by Radiolab co-creator Ellen Horne, she made the point that while podcast producers spend so much time maximizing audio quality—booking recording studios for interviewees, buying expensive shotgun mics for field tape—there’s something arresting about “shitty” tape. Recording a phone call on speakerphone, in all its static and tinniness, conveys information in a way that pristine tape doesn’t. It makes the listener feel like we’re going on an investigation together, as if we’re flipping through the yellow pages and cold-calling random numbers.
Aftersun’s camcorder is the fulcrum of the film’s stunning final shot. We rewatch low-res footage of Sophie waving goodbye to her father at the airport, which then abruptly shudders to a halt. We slowly pan right, revealing adult Sophie sitting on her couch watching the footage projected onto a screen. The camera continues panning right, rotating a full 360 degrees, and we now see Calum standing in a liminal, fluorescent-lit hallway, filming with the camcorder. He then snaps it shut, turns around, and starts walking away, slipping the camcorder into a backpack he carries on one shoulder and pushing open the double doors at the end of the hall, revealing that on the other side is the purgatorial rave we see throughout the film, with Calum disappearing into the blackness and strobe light and bodies.
I’m tearing up as I write this, as I often do when thinking about the ending. I assume the airport is the last time Sophie ever sees her father. The first word I can think of with “after” as a prefix is “afterlife,” which is perhaps where Calum sets off for.
This is what sets Aftersun apart from so many other European and American independent/art films, which often as a reaction to Hollywood blockbusters adopt an aesthetic of stubborn literalness (e.g. the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Kelly Reichardt (who to be clear I love)). I’m thirty-one years old. I have people to take care of and responsibilities to meet. Culture—movies, books, music, video games—has always been a refuge for me, a way to experience a few hours of wonderment and curiosity between performing the routine tasks of workaday existence.
As I’ve gotten older, the magic is harder to find. I watch a lot of movies that’re pretty good, but very few that floor me in the way they did when I was younger. Sitting in the theater as Aftersun’s credits rolled—in the brief contemplative moment before I took off my glasses, put on my coat, shouldered my backpack, and emerged from the darkness to endure the hour-long train ride from Lower Manhattan to Central Brooklyn—I realized that the magic I once felt and that Sophie felt in her younger days, before she grew up and lost her father and found people to take care of and responsibilities to meet, is not gone. It’s just occasional, and all the more precious for it.
****
Boen Wang is a writer, audio producer, and adjunct instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. His written work has appeared in The Sunday Long Read, The New Republic, and elsewhere. His audio work has appeared in This American Life, Radiolab, and elsewhere. Visit his website at boen.cool