Aftersun: The Skin of Filmic Memory

We all wait for everything to come into focus, and if we are lucky, we might eventually get access to one snapshot that tells an incomplete story. So naturally, while the Polaroid does come into focus, everything else does not. Life, loss, death, trauma, or love cannot be contained in a single photograph.

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We all have childhood memories – images, sounds, touches – that stay with us for the duration of our lives. These are, by and large, out-of-focus fragments from the past that repeatedly grab hold of us and perhaps even take full control of our emotions in the present. Charlotte Wells’s debut film, Aftersun (2022), functions just like one of these identity-defining, nebulous yet overwhelming, memories. The film imperceptibly creeps up on the viewer, then lingers on the mind well past its conclusion. Aftersun is a study in mourning, a filmic essay about time and memory, and perhaps most of all, it is a work about cinema’s ability to touch, both in the emotional sense and in very physical ways, too.

The plot is deceptively simple: a young Scottish father, on the cusp of his thirty-first birthday, spends a few days with his eleven-year-old daughter on vacation in sunny Turkey. Through a belated flash-forward, the audience deduces that it is the adult daughter, herself about to turn thirty-one, who sifts through incomplete memories of the vacation. She presumably searches to put together a fuller picture of her father, who seems to have passed away soon after this vacation. As the film begins, young Sophie (Frankie Coriov) is playfully filming her father, Calum (Paul Mescal) – a scene that would turn out to be one of the key moments in the film, which fully unfolds at about the halfway point of the story. What is established right away is the fact that the experience of the film is mediated by Sophie’s distorted perspective. At the end of the film, Wells revisits adult Sophie, who watches the vacation tapes. Very belatedly, then, the audience learns that Sophie is equally character and spectator, placing her in a contiguous relationship with the viewers. I will return to this scene shortly, but for now it is worth stressing that Sophie’s recollection of her father is necessarily spotty because memory is generally unreliable. Having access to the home videos helps both Sophie and the audience, but in the end the recordings do not grant us access to the full picture. Calum is meant to remain elusive. Neither adult Sophie nor we the viewers get to know everything about him. As a matter of fact, that is the beauty of the film – it obscures reality and leaves its details to the imagination. In other words, it does what a fiction film is supposed to do: there are no “answers,” only emotions. It does not matter that we do not know exactly what happened to Calum, or what afflicted him. What’s important is that the audience must sit with Sophie and patiently wait alongside her as she deals with the weight of memory and tries to make sense of loss.

In the meantime, we cannot help but wonder about Calum – there is no doubt that he suffers, as is made crystal clear by a powerful scene in which the camera centers on his naked back while he sits on the side of the bed, convulsing with sobs. What is he suffering from? There are only hints to (mis)guide us. We know that he was only about twenty years old when Sophie was born. We learn that he does not have much money, and that he may have made some bad financial decisions. We know that he moved from Scotland to London and that he hopes to get a business off the ground with his friend Keith, with whom he would likely share a house, too. So, the first speculation is that he is closeted. Besides his “roommate” Keith, Calum has an unusual and more-than-cordial relationship with Sophie’s mother, to whom he says “love you.” Furthermore, there is a moment in the film when young Sophie observes two young men passionately kissing. Adult Sophie, who is in a relationship with another woman, also repeatedly searches for her father at a hallucinatory rave party, a scene that has historically intersected with queer communities. We also witness a touchless but tender moment on a boat between Calum and a young scuba instructor. As the former smiles warmly, the latter gives him advice about how to put on the scuba suit (to place a plastic bag over the foot before sliding it down the neoprene leg). Is this a not-so-veiled reference to wearing a condom? Could Calum be, then, a victim of the early ’90s HIV pandemic?1 Calum himself tells the young instructor that he had not imagined making to his thirties much less to the forties, meaning that he lives on borrowed time. The second speculation, and in more general terms, is that he suffers from a different degenerative disease. Calum is physically breaking down: he does not know how he broke his wrist, nor how his shoulder became so tender and inflamed that Sophie could not touch it. Finally, he could be suffering from depression, which would be supported by the allusion to having suicidal thoughts, materialized during the night scene when he jumps fully clothed into the sea.

However, the scenes in which Calum appears by himself are likely to be constructions of adult Sophie’s imagination. They are attempts to fill the gaps in the narrative that she tries to construct about her father. When memory fails, or when Sophie does not have video proof of what really happened, the film supplements the narrative with well-placed sonic elements. For example, once Calum visually disappears into the sea, exaggerated noises of the waves swell up, which are akin to the sonic rhythms of the rave to which we often return. A second noteworthy sound is the whirring of the camera opening and closing. This is a constant reminder that the film is about the cinematic apparatus, too, as film projectors hum in the back of the theater. In fact, the film sonically begins with that very noise. A third example of ingenious sound use is the long take of Calum stepping outside on the balcony to smoke while Sophie falls asleep in the foreground. Her steady breathing seemingly increases in intensity and volume, as if to match Calum’s apparent, but never fully explained, physical distress.

Despite the important contribution of the sonic to the narrative, the film most certainly favors the haptic. Because the two characters have a strong bodily connection (nonsexual, of course), the audience slowly constructs a similar bodily relationship with the film itself. We can observe the haptic quality of the film by first focusing on intradiegetic moments that underline physical touch. There are several moments when father and daughter gently and lovingly touch one another: during the repeated nightly ritual of putting on lotion (i.e., after sun) on each other’s faces, during the many times when Calum reapplies sun lotion on Sophia, or when they cover each other’s bodies with mud during a day trip into the countryside. The director’s preference to shoot in close-ups, reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s intimate dramas (in fact, one might consider Wild Strawberries, 1957, a distant relative of Wells’s film), further emphasizes the haptic. The intimacy generated by the persistent close-ups matches the tenderness between father and daughter. Moreover, they do not give the audience as much access to the psyche of the characters (which is what close-ups usually tend to do). Instead, they seem to bolster the sensation of touch, the camera lingering on and caressing the back of Calum’s neck or his ailing shoulders. The sensation of filmic touch then turns memory itself more material, more “real,” giving it a surface, a skin really, that both Sophie and the audience can caress. Like the characters’ sunbathed skin, this skin of memory has also been under duress, and it requires treatment with an after sun – the film itself.

One of the technical elements that contributes to filmic materiality (and, by extension, to memory’s materiality) is the grainy quality of the MiniDV camera, which lends several shots to the main narrative. There are also several murky shots at night, and plenty of other moments when it is not immediately evident what happens visually. For example, the morning before one of their day trips, the sleeping bodies of the two characters are reduced to indecipherable, reddish, coarse dots on the screen. Theorist Laura Marks qualifies this type of blurring as “haptic visuality” (2000: 2). From haptic visuality, Marks sketches out the definition of haptic cinema, whose properties can be graininess, changes in focus, underexposure, overexposure, filters, scratches or fading from the film deteriorating and so on (2000: 171-172, 192). The possibility that emerges is that vision itself can be tactile in moments when it lingers on the surface of the image without going into depth, without penetrating beyond the skin of the image. The classic cinematic moment of haptic visuality is the beginning of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), a film that also deals with memory and trauma. Hiroshima famously opens on two entwined bodies, covered in ash, but the details of their embrace only turn clear following several dissolves. As the focus of the scene crystallizes on the two bodies, the image allows the viewers to penetrate beneath the surface and to access its meanings (i.e., this image is not just about love but also about trauma, loss, and the aftereffects of the atomic bomb). Furthermore, the ash that covers the bodies lends them a texture that exceeds the human skin, which, in some way, penetrates back through the screen and contacts the audience. In this, a reciprocal act occurs: the audience is given access to the depths of the image, while the image shrinks the space between two-dimensional screen and spectators. This is exactly what Sophie, and by extension Wells, both aim to do – to penetrate beneath the blemished skin of unreliable memory and try to fix it from within.

To further illustrate these attempts, let’s return to the key moment, referenced above, when Sophie films her father. The scene – another long take that lasts about five minutes – starts with Sophie filming the room, presumably for her mother, and the audience sees the “live” feed of the recording on the small TV in the hotel room. Sophie talks about having just turned eleven, and she makes a crack about her father being a hundred and thirty. On the small screen, besides the live recording, we can also see the reflection of Calum on the balcony, standing in the spot where the film had begun. Sophie asks what he had thought at age eleven about his future self, and he becomes discomfited, refuses to answer, and demands she turn off the camera. When she does not listen, he does it for her, and then they both sit on the side of the bed. Sophie defiantly exclaims, “I’ll just record it in my little mind camera,” which is an obvious reference to her future desire to access the very same memories as an adult. The composition of the mostly static shot continues to play on the theme of memory. In the far-right corner, the MiniDV camera sits where Calum had placed it, slightly off-screen but visible enough to remind us that it is an intradiegetic reminder of the (larger) cinematic act. It is a Panasonic DS77, as the conspicuous open box in the room informs us. Moving left, and on a slight diagonal, the two characters appear in a reflection in the bluish tint of the small TV. A stack of books follows. They are mostly books that point to Calum’s attempts (meditation, self-awareness, and tai chi) to deal with whatever ills besiege him, as well as a reference to Scottish writer and filmmaker Margaret Tait, whose poetry volume features among the otherwise mundane titles. Finally, in the lower-right corner of the frame, Calum’s head appears in the hotel mirror, almost as an afterthought. In sum, the long take seems to encapsulate the direction, theme, and meaning(s) of the entire film: that the idle MiniDV, having captured memories, represents the starting point; that the two characters are only truly together in a fleeting reflection, or memory, living on a screen that is turned off and that fails to give them fullness; and finally, that Calum’s diminutive reflection is a reminder of how little we know about him.

In the last sequence, Wells tries one more time to shrink the physical and temporal distance between the two characters. As young Sophie waves goodbye to her dad, the film freezes and then transitions to the present. The camera pans right, obscuring the cut, and continues to rotate completing a full 180 degrees that began with the freeze-frame (i.e., the past) and ends with Sophie sitting on the couch (i.e., the present), Panasonic camera on her lap. A siren is heard on the soundtrack, and it is a distinctly American siren, suggesting a move not just in time but also in space (from Glasgow to an American city). Then a second acousmatic noise makes itself heard – baby gurgles made by Sophie’s son (i.e., the future). The camera continues to rotate beyond adult Sophie, only instead of returning to the previous camera projection on the wall and completing the 360 degrees, it again transitions by obscuring the cut to a vision of Calum holding the same camera that Sophie holds. To summarize, we go from past, to present, and to a future past, as the sound bridge of the baby’s gurgles aurally connects the space and time of the apartment with the space and time of the imagined Calum. The final sequence brings three generations together in what might amount to a healing act: young Sophie/past, adult Sophie/present, baby/future, Calum/past and future thanks to the sonic cue. Calum’s legacy lives on through the grandson he never met, and whom we never visually meet either, but it feels like both the audience and Calum can hear him. Just as Sophie is both character and spectator, in the final instance Calum turns into character and sonic witness. As the gurgles of the baby continue, the past-father-turned-future-grandad closes the camera, smiles, turns around, and walks through a set of doors leading him back into a heavenly rave.

Although the last shot may seem like the most appropriate moment on which to end this short essay, I would like to propose an alternative. It has already been established that adult Sophie searches to recapture the emotions and memories of childhood, which are jumbled by the passage of time and by her then-imminent entry into the typically turbulent teen years. So, it is worth repeating that most of what she remembers cannot be trusted. However, there is one fleeting moment that perfectly distills both Sophie’s and the director’s attempts to take hold of the past. As father and daughter dine outdoors on their last night, a random man offers to take a  Polaroid of them. After Calum pays the man, he places the photograph on the table as the camera faces downward, patiently waiting for the  Polaroid to come into focus. The characters keep bantering, with only Calum’s elbow visible in the shot, while the  Polaroid slowly creeps into existence. This is the defining metaphor of and for the film – a synecdoche to be more precise. We all wait for everything to come into focus, and if we are lucky, we might eventually get access to one snapshot that tells an incomplete story. So naturally, while the  Polaroid does come into focus, everything else does not. Life, loss, death, trauma, or love cannot be contained in a single photograph. In fact, even moving photographs are insufficient, as most truths about past versions of ourselves, as Aftersun shows, remain out of reach and forever out of focus.

Works Cited

Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.

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All images are screenshots from the film.