AFTERSUN (A-minus) - Newcomer Charlotte Wells films this childhood reverie as if reflecting it off the surface of a lake, shimmery and, at times, distorted. That's probably how she remembered or imagined a similar vacation trip to Turkey with her divorced father circa the 1990s.
Little Sophie (Frankie Corio) wields a camcorder during their hotel stay, and Wells intersperses these "found" images into her own fictional narrative, and it's never clear whether any of Sophie's memories are entirely accurate. It's a clever device -- is the adult Sophie (whom we see just a few glimpses of in a modern, drab domestic existence) remembering or misremembering? Is this her brain, triggered by video snippets, firing off neurons? Her dad eventually died at some point; is she trying to reconstruct her favorite memory?
Sophie and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), are not that far apart in age, and they get mistaken for brother and sister. He can be a goofball (his wrist is in a cast at the beginning of the movie), and he amuses his daughter at times but also worries her. Meantime, Sophie, 13, is growing curious about boys and sex, still innocent but on the brink of womanhood. Their fetching bond is reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's similarly ruminative "Somewhere" from 2010.
Wells chops up the narrative a bit. Dialogue -- laden with thick accents -- sometimes passes by too quickly to catch. That seems like an intentional attempt at disorienting the viewer, jangling the senses. Confusion or misperception is the point at times. Meantime, Corio and Mescal make for a winsome pair.
THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (B) - Filmmaker Bianca Stigter works with Glenn Kurtz, who found his grandfather's vacation movies from summer 1939 in Poland and turned the journey of discovery into a book. Stigter takes between 3 and 4 minutes of film footage from the grandfather's hometown and uses clips and stills from it as her only images, over 70 minutes, to conduct a microcosmic study of the town's inhabitants, most of whom would be captured months later and perish in the Holocaust.
As gimmicks go, it's a fascinating exercise in video discipline. Stigter plays scenes over and over again. She zooms in to the granular level. She hunts for clues of identification. She finds at least one of the kids in the video, and we hear him, 80 years later, tell stories about the others and the village. Stigler doesn't show him, because she is faithful to her concept, which is to show only the images from the video, and it's frustrating to not indulge in one of the great joys of documentary viewing, which is to compare how someone looked then and now. (His face will flash by in the credits.)
The forensic work by Sigter and Kurtz, which recalls the endless analysis of the Zapruder film following the Kennedy assassination, is fascinating at times. (They get an assist from Steven Spielberg's Film and Video Archive.) The restoration crew takes the blurry image of a sign above a shop and reconstruct it, finally finding the family name of the grocers who operated the store.
Frankly, the second half starts to drag -- not just the repetition, but also the rote recitation of some of the horrors that befell the town with the Nazi invasion by December. Watching the images recur and play out in different rhythms can be hypnotic, though. If you have the historian's gene, you might be rapt throughout; if not, the first 20 minutes might be enough.
BONUS TRACK
"Aftersun" has a subdued retro soundtrack. Corio charms with a monotone karaoke reading of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion." Here's the original:
The trailers:
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