The effects of Covid can still be felt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s not evident in the spaces of the event itself — screening rooms are packed with mostly maskless audiences; restaurants and bars overflow once more — but it is there on the screen. Moviemakers have turned inwards: in film after film, the focus is on community and family. Early on in the main competition strand we had the man-and-boy war story Father and Soldier, then came the wayward melodrama Brother and Sister; still to come is the immigrant tale Mother and Son.
Better than any of them, though requiring a detour to the Critics’ Week sidebar, is the small wonder Aftersun, a film that positively hums with atmosphere and glows with its maker’s promise. Written and directed with subtle grace by Scottish first-timer Charlotte Wells and produced by Moonlight-maker Barry Jenkins, it begins with the deceptively straightforward premise of a divorced dad of 30 and his 11-year-old daughter holidaying at a package resort in Turkey in the 1990s.
Pools are splashed about in, ice creams are eaten, lagers downed, slot machines played. Days pass in the languid fashion of such sun-kissed breaks. Occasionally we find ourselves watching scratchy camcorder footage that breaks up the primary-colour palette of summer and reinforces the well-crafted feel of a hazy holiday memory.
Nothing particularly eventful occurs. The father-daughter relationship is loving and breezy, Paul Mescal (star of Normal People) convincingly conveying the sense of an entirely normal parent who dotes on his “poppet”, his worst crime asking “You OK?” a little too often. Sophie (captivating newcomer Frankie Corio) seems happy, confident and uncombative. There are the first stirrings of sexual awakening but nothing to upset dad, more the sense of a liminal phase — this may be the last holiday before adolescence complicates things.
What then is this nagging sense that something is off? Is it in the hefty books on meditation and tai chi that Calum has lugged along with him on holiday? Or in the slight heaviness that comes over him once Sophie is asleep? Is his benignly smiling countenance a hard-won facade? Wells gives only the merest hints but has a way of framing shots in unconventional ways, adding shadows and reflections and manipulating sound design, especially ambient noises and silences, that makes you lean in and look for hidden meanings that may or may not be there.
Is this what Sophie is doing in replaying the footage? Could it be that she missed some subtle warning signs? Did we? But then, don’t we all — don’t we always?
★★★★★
Festival runs to May 28, festival-cannes.com
