The Oscars 2023 are getting closer. This Tuesday, January 24, the nominees who will compete on March 12 in Hollywood were revealed, and the nomination of Irish actor Paul Mescal in the Best Actor category for his performance in the movie Aftersun drew special attention.
Although Aftersun has not been a commercial success in the box office sense, the film has received all kinds of praise and positive reviews around the world. The premise is simple: Through camcorders, melancholy polaroids, and footage, we witness a father and daughter’s vacation in Turkey in the late 1990s. It is a world without cell phones, without social networks; a world where the only alternative for memory were those camcorders that today are covered in dust under our beds, and that in their tapes eternalize the past forever.
Aftersun draws on the devices of yesteryear to achieve its melancholic charm. SPECIAL/ A24
Eleven-year-old Sophie (played by the young Frankie Corio) is a pre-adolescent who leaves childhood with greater speed every day, and enters the precipitous universe of adolescence; a universe of flourishing sexuality and latent eroticism under the heat of the Turkish sun. Sophie is an observant, insightful and analytical girl, who, however, is not free from the whims of her age. It is through her gaze that we meet Calum, her father, a 31-year-old manapparently jovial and carefree, and who does not fit the traditional image of fatherhood, to the point that they mistake him for his own daughter’s older brother.
Calum, more than a father, becomes his daughter’s brother-friend, tender at the same time, and with all the dysfunctional repercussions that this entails. Calum is a living chiaroscuro: in moments he is a happy and social being, full of life and love, attentive and playful with his daughter. But he suddenly seems unable to face the world, he withdraws into a world of incomprehensible silences, and is distant and almost cruel to Sophie when these feelings absorb him. He is surrounded by self-help books, he practices tai chi to combat anxiety; he has not achieved a stable relationship since his divorce with Sophie’s mother, he has financial problems that do not go unnoticed by her daughter, and before which she, immersed in her abrupt puberty, does not have much tact.
Aftersun allows us to get intimate with Sophie and Calum in their relationship. SPECIAL/ A24
Our sad parents: Fatherhood and depression
Although the film never addresses it explicitly, it soon becomes clear that Calum is dealing with depression alone. The way he balances against the void, standing up, on the railing of his balcony; how he runs to the sea in the middle of the night, how he heals his injured arm as a result of an accident that he can never pinpoint, how he cries alone, naked, as if an internal storm was tearing at his soul. Situations that her daughter does not understand, but that she lives, while the days that remain on vacation are coming to an end.
At some point in the film, Calum confesses that he never imagined himself reaching 30, and that 40 seems impossible to him. He is direct with his daughter; she asks him, when she grows up, to tell her about every boy she kisses, about every drug she takes: whatever she wants. Aftersun does not address irresponsible parenthood, as Calum loves his daughter, Rather, it shows us the portrait of a man who cannot make peace with his life itself, who is overwhelmed with pain and sadness that he does not share with anyone, and that they are consuming it little by little, regardless of their paternity. These blue seas, those resplendent skies, those laughs from his daughter, fail to rob him of the grief that suffocates him from within.
SPECIAL/ A24
In the end, Aftersun is an exercise in memory: the memories of a daughter who has grown up, and who tries to understand her father many years later, through the treasured memories of that summer in Turkey that was never repeated. Well, since adulthood, Sophie has not yet been able to reconcile herself with the reminiscences of her father, this sad, silent man, full of life, but also darkness, whom the film allows us to assume that she never saw again after that vacation trip. The only way for Sophie to have him back is to rescue him from what she left of the past.
Aftersun is a film that humanizes parents, that shows us their internal struggles, and that makes us see that they are much more than just a parental role. They are people with pain, sadness and bitterness, unfulfilled dreams, and so much life behind them that sometimes it is simply impossible for them to bear. And perhaps they understand too late, or simply resign themselves, that parenthood will not save them from this.
Paul Mescal, the unexpected Oscar candidate
Paul Mescal received widespread acclaim for his portrayal of Calum, a thirty-something, middle-class father struggling with depression. SPECIAL/ A24
At just 26 years old, Paul Mescal got his first nomination for the Oscars, in the Best Actor category, for his leading role in Aftersun. A complex, sad, contradictory character: human. As he himself mentioned in an interview, “I’m definitely interested in playing characters who have deep, rich emotional lives, and so far, a lot of it has been a sad, deep, rich emotional life.”
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