Charlotte Wells has made one feature and three shorts, and every one of them is about a person who will not talk about what is wrong. Aftersun (2022) is patient, exact and painful, and it is enough to make us want to see whatever comes next.
Fi1m perspective
A father sits at a table in a Turkish resort while his daughter stands up at the karaoke and sings on her own, small and flat, to a room of sunburnt strangers. She wanted them to sing together. He would not go up. Charlotte Wells stays on the table rather than the stage, and that is her method in one shot: she films the thing a person does not do. We found it hard to look at, because a child was being braver than her parent and both of them knew it.
That was Aftersun (2022), her first feature and so far her only one. Before it came three shorts made at film school: Tuesday (2015), about a teenage girl visiting her dead father's home; Laps (2016), nearly wordless, about an assault on a subway; and Blue Christmas (2017), set in 1960s Scotland, about a debt collector who will not face his wife's crisis. Wells has said they are 'all about characters denying or avoiding something', and the feature is too. Since then she has made commercials and sat on festival juries. What we have to go on is one film and three shorts.
It is a good film to have. Gregory Oke shoots the holiday on 35mm and lets Sophie's camcorder footage sit inside it, so that some of the week reaches us as it looked and some as it was recorded, and the two do not quite match. Blair McClendon cuts the days in loose stretches, buffet and pool and arcade, so that time passes the way it does on holiday, without anyone noticing. Oliver Coates keeps his cello out of the daylight and lets the hotel speakers carry the period. Paul Mescal plays Calum a beat behind his own cheerfulness, and Frankie Corio, a newcomer, watches him with a face that does the commenting the script declines to. Wells gets both performances without one scene in which anyone explains anything.
Our reservation is the cutting away. Every so often Aftersun leaves the holiday for a few frames of something else, and for the first hour those interludes told us there was a wound before the film had shown us one. They pay off, but we resented them while they lasted, and the few critics who never came round call the whole film style over substance. We think they are wrong. Sophie does not know what is wrong with her father, the film is her memory, and so neither do we. Even so, a method built on withholding will not survive a second film that withholds the same things.
That is what her next feature has to answer. A director this good at what people do not say will need, at some point, to find something they do. We would book the evening regardless.
Biography
Charlotte Wells is a Scottish film director and writer. She wrote and directed the feature film Aftersun (2022), her debut in the format.
Born in Edinburgh, she is based in New York and previously made short films while studying at New York University.
