wrt last post (aftersun) reviews collected
https://slate.com/culture/2022/11/aftersun-paul-mescal-movie-ending-meaning-final-shot.html
“Memory is a slippery thing; details are hazy, fickle. The more you strain, the less you see. A memory of a memory endlessly corrupting itself. I’ve caught myself recently claiming that feeling is more robust, but it’s tricky. Because in recalling a point in time and how that moment made you feel, it is framed by a new feeling—the feeling of what that moment means to you now. In Turkish, a language rich in vocabulary not easily rendered into English, ‘hasret’ means some combination of longing, love, and loss. It seems particularly appropriate in this context and to this film.”
https://a24films.com/notes/2022/10/a-note-from-charlotte-wells
“The first time I saw Aftersun, I was struck by how upset it made me, but not entirely in the way I’d been prepared for. [...] Wells’ film is so adept at portraying how childhood memories work, plucking out incidents that feel minor, or snatched bits of dialogue that are little more than offhand remarks, and letting them linger in the mind; I can’t count how many of the sharpest memories of my past are of seemingly minor incidents that lodged in my gray matter, for whatever reason.”
https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/best-movies-2022-aftersun.html
We tend to think of memories as crystallized moments of time, loosely strung together along the trellises of a drooping chandelier somewhere deep within our mind. And yet, personal experience tells us that our pasts are composed from an infinite swirl of different sources — real and invented — each of them crudely sewn together with the same desperation that our sleeping brains might arrange a billion random neurons into a semi-coherent dream.
Some of those sources are soft as ghosts, and likewise change shape in the shadows. Others are much harder, as still and tactile as a rug on the floor. Both can be evocative, but neither are enough to connect all the dots; not when you’re trying to re-trace someone you loved from the vague silhouette they left behind.
Wells’ ingenious construction allows “Aftersun” to unfold from a dual perspective that seems to filter it through the eyes of an adult and a child at the same time. We look for discrepancies, scanning the screen for answers to questions that we don’t even know to ask yet until even the film’s most banal images seem rife with secrets.
[E]ven after watching “Aftersun” four times, I’m still not sure if time will help Sophie come to a better understanding of who her dad was, or if their holiday was the last age when they could possibly have been as honest with each other as they were.
Wells’ film is able to follow its characters through the strobe light of lost time because Mescal and Corio make it so tempting for us to complete their performances for them — to fill in the gaps with the same urgency that we might want to close our own. Few movies have ever ended with a more tempting invitation to do something impossible, but “Aftersun” is so unforgettable because of the agonizing beauty it finds in the futile act of trying.
I often think of the wonderful scene in which Sophie tries to interview Calum on camera, only for her dad to clam up and make her shut it off. “Fine,” she says, “I’ll just record it in my little mind camera.” She doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s a lens she’ll be looking through for the rest of her life; it’s where we look for the people we love when there’s nowhere else to find them.
https://www.indiewire.com/2022/09/aftersun-review-1234758492/ ( :( )
