Fathers are like children – Weekend – Kommersant
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At the box office, “My Sunshine” is an intimate drama about growing up, which always comes ahead of time, and about memory as the best therapy available to mankind.
Probably late nineties. Heat. Stupid hotel in Turkey that does not match the description in the advertising booklets. Ten days of vacation that Calum (Paul Mescal) gets to spend with Sophie (Frankie Corio), his eleven-year-old daughter, already interested in boys more than pool games or milkshakes. Everyone takes Calum for an older brother. No wonder he looks and acts like a teenager. At dinner, he orders too much beer, at any moment he can withdraw into his black thoughts and go into the night, forgetting that Sophie does not have a key to the room, at the same time he is not noticed in severity and is ready to discuss almost everything that excites his daughter. Discuss, but do not reassure. He has no answer to the eternal questions – why are you and your mother no longer together? Why are not you working? Why can’t you stay longer at the resort? Why are other families happy? Why are other children more fortunate?
“Aftersun”, which received the extremely inaccurate title “My Sun” in the Russian box office, is the debut of Scottish Charlotte Wells, clearly based on personal memories of a severe childhood trauma. The fact that this story, as if devoid of a narrative – a father and daughter toil at a resort, then find a common language, then pout at each other – will end terribly, the viewer has no doubts from the very first frame. Because we have the past in front of us, something that exists only in overexposed photographs, in a washed-out T-shirt from a gift shop, in the back streets of memory, which always surrounds the tragedies that have happened with some kind of sfumato. Was it one way or another? That’s when it was worth keeping silent or, on the contrary, to express everything? What difference does it make, no matter how much you rack your brains twenty years later, you can’t fix what you’ve done, you can’t bring back the dead.
Sophie has grown up. Getting up at night to her baby, feeding him in frightening silence, she often thinks about her father, about those sunny days, about insignificant quarrels, about stupid jokes, about everything that is seen more clearly at a distance – in this life there is no one to blame, no one not guilty that life decides for everyone who will be and who will die.
Wells, together with his cameraman Gregory Oke, specially imitates amateur shooting – the horizon is littered, the size jumps, the focus is often knocked down. This is a home video on the eve of the final loss of the house. After the holidays, Sophie won’t see her father again, her last memory being Calum alone, frozen in the airport’s sliding doors. Behind him is a sunny haze, a bright white light that makes it difficult to see the true expression of his eyes. What did he feel then? Did you have any idea what was in store for him? Or maybe he already knew.
At the film’s climax, Sophie drags Calum onto the karaoke stage, a nightly entertainment for lazy guests. A father and daughter have a little tradition of singing “Losing My Religion” together. But this time, Calum refuses to make faces in public, and Sophie, unbearably out of tune, sings alone, hoping that dad will overcome his depression and come out to support her. It is in vain to admit to the public that faith in the happy outcome of one’s own life is lost, Calum has no strength. This is not a circus act, this is his swan song, the words of which he would rather not know, but every detail of the biography fits REM’s music perfectly.
Years later, Sophie would think that her whim was an example of careless handling of the feelings of a man who tried to take care of her as best he could, to protect her from everything, putting her to bed, with special tenderness smeared her shoulders with after-sun cream, and then smoked on the balcony, with bitterly realizing that he is not able to protect anyone. And even then there was no way to help him, even then her father burned down, burned on a completely indifferent life.
At the box office from March 16
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