![]() “And if I can see the sun, then I think about the fact that we can both see the sun. “Well, like, sometimes at playtime, I look up to the sky,” Sophie replies. “I think it’s nice that we share the same sky,” Sophie says. I too crave more time with my parent, but fear what realizations that might bring.Įarly in the film, Sophie and Calum lay by the pool. She has a bittersweet relationship with her father, inextricable from a nostalgia that I already feel, however nonsensical. In Aftersun, at some point, we realize that these scenes are all recollections, reconstructed from camcorder videos and memories by an adult Sophie, now with her own partner and child, her toes touching the red, patterned Turkish rug that Calum couldn’t afford but bought anyway on that vacation. A line from the Marge Piercy poem “ My mother’s body” jumps to mind: “You sing in my mind like wine/ What you did not dare in your life you dare in mine.” I feel this almost every time I look at my mom these days. We, like Calum, yo-yo through life, oscillating between the inability to get out of bed and forcing ourselves up, determined to start fresh. ![]() Neither of us want to admit to the other-my only mother, her only child-that it feels like our bones don’t work. Over the years-and especially during peak pandemic, when the two of us shared a small home-we’ve navigated our depression together, making it slightly less lonely but also infinitely more so. ![]() To me, she is, too-I just understand now the complexities behind that. If you ask my friends from home, who refer to my mom as “Mama Z,” she is a loving, doting mother figure, always making sure everyone had enough to eat. And I think he’s an excellent father, but he obviously has a lot going on behind closed doors.” “There’s something really colorful about him, and exuberant. “There’s a very distinct public versus private aspect to him,” Mescal told Mubi, the global streaming platform that released the film in the U.K. Regardless of his mental health, Calum is a good dad, a great dad. Without a thought, he relegated himself to a tiny rollaway cot-something my mom has done (figuratively, if not literally) time and time again. When Sophie returns to the room (with the help of the receptionist, having been literally, accidentally, shut out by Calum), she finds him passed out on her bed and covers him with a sheet.īut that’s the thing: Calum is asleep on the lone bed in the hotel room, which he had immediately bequeathed to Sophie at the beginning of the vacation. But that was just a dream.” This alone strummed at my heartstrings. “I thought that I heard you laughing,” she croons at her dad. So Sophie takes the stage alone, awkwardly singing solo to “ Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. But tonight, Calum’s had a few beers too many and isn’t feeling up to it. Sophie has signed herself up for a karaoke duet with her dad, something they’ve done every holiday. It’s a turning point in the film, following a string of unhurried sequences-lounging by the pool, watching paragliders drift by, taking in cheap resort entertainment. The night I arrived in Chicago this past month, I came home from a date and my mom had had too much to drink, gone to where I could not follow, eerily reminiscent of another scene from the movie. When my mom was my age, she attempted suicide-the unspoken theme that quietly flows through Aftersun, alongside the glittering Mediterranean. He tells a diving instructor he’s surprised he made it to 30, and doesn’t expect to make it to 40. While Sophie and Calum are in Turkey, Calum turns 31. I watched Aftersun on the flight from New York to Chicago-one of the more vulnerable ways to watch a movie-on my way home to celebrate my mom’s 57th birthday. ![]()
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