The mom of a close friend’s partner passed away today. She called me in the morning saying she didn’t know what to do—he wasn’t talking to her. It has been raining all day—on and off. There hasn’t been a sliver of sunlight. I have been in my room. I don’t like white light—my room is dark, with a yellow lamp and some light from outside.
I watched Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) in the evening. The film is solemn, sombre, beautiful. It depicts a most tender relationship between a father and daughter, played exceptionally by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, but you know from the get-go that something’s wrong, terribly wrong. The music is simply out-of-sync, jarring, against the image. It is clear that this is the father’s last holiday with his daughter, he is stealing each glance, each moment with her, memorialising it forever in his hurting heart even as she etches it in her video camera. He is troubled by something he cannot share with her, he is with her—more fully than most others—and yet he is in his own world. She has only begun growing up. The first inklings of sexual desire, taste for risk, and wanting for individual autonomy are setting in. He is tired.
So much of the film is an ode to the always fragile relationship between parents and children. One expects that they must travel the same road, together, always, but they simply cannot. If memory and desire are the life resources of the self, the parent is too laden with the former and too tired to grasp the latter. In the film, the father is only thirty-one but he is already prey to his internal demons. He tells someone in the film, “I am surprised I made it to thirty.” The film is filled with foreshadowing. Each second of the frame, each moment spent together, seems scarce, hurtling toward extinguishment, towards an end. The film is a challenge to the viewer—one must relish the purest form of love and intimacy between the father and daughter even as one expects the hat to drop the very next moment.
Loss is the grammar of life. Each moment spent is time lost. Each breath taken—the film frequently consists of the bare sound of breathing—is one breath less left in the body’s life energy. To live a moment is therefore to lose it, irrevocably. What does one do with love then? What of happiness, beauty, and desire? It seems to me more and more that there is no purpose to life. Yet, one lives each day as if there were a purpose, as if life would end up somewhere, when its only destination is death and utter loss. And yet, how else one must live? In a constant state of mourning? Mourning one’s own life? Mourning the loss of loved ones, the loss of deep-rooted aspirations, the loss of home. Does one become like the grey clouds outside my dark room’s window today, always on the brink of crying, never opening themselves to light?
Or does one tend to this loss? Like the father whose fingertips caress his daughter’s face even as he caresses himself in that act. There’s a scene in the film when Sophie says, “even when we are far away, we are under the same sun.” The sun tends to us all, even as in that act, it burns itself, constantly toward its own destruction. Time is the greatest force of all—it inflicts wounds on our fragile hearts each passing moment. And yet, all we can do is tend to its wounds, say to ourselves with Shahid—the poet of loss par excellence—“mad heart, be brave.”
Images from AFTERSUN | Official Trailer | MUBI
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