Memory Box: Charlotte Wells on Aftersun

In Aftersun, not very much happens on screen, but everything happens. This debut film from 35-year-old Edinburgh-born filmmaker Charlotte Wells initially presents as a relatively simple drama. Set in the late 90s, it follows an 11-year-old Scottish girl, Sophie (Frankie Corio), and her young-at-30 father, Calum (Paul Mescal), on holiday at a low-rent Turkish resort. The trip itself is rather short on incident. They do fall out a bit – these’s a tiff involving a karaoke performance of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion – but otherwise, they spend lazy days idling by the pool or suffering through the cheesy entertainment put on in the evenings by the hotel's holiday reps. Inside, however, both Calum and Sophie are going through life-altering emotions, although each is oblivious to the true nature and magnitude of the other’s inner experience.

As a film-daft youngster, she harboured aspirations to be a director. An early taster of filmmaking came at the recently-boarded-up Filmhouse. "That's a space that means a great deal to me," Wells said recently at the London Film Festival. "When I was younger, I was part of Filmhouse's movie-making group SKAMM (Scottish Kids are Making Movies), where precocious 12-year-olds were programming Ozu films when I had absolutely no idea what that was and frankly wouldn't for decades."

But by the time she won a place studying film at NYU in her mid-20s, it was the business side of filmmaking she was more interested in. “Producing felt like the thing that would allow me to tie together a lot of different interests,” Wells tells us from her flat in New York, “and work on a variety of projects and subjects.” The course required that she direct some short films, however, and once she tried out the director’s chair there was no turning back. “It was just clear that with directing I had found this thing I really, really loved. I wanted to experience that feeling more.”

Wells began sowing the seeds that would become Aftersun around 2015. She shared her vague idea of a feature about a father and daughter on holiday with her professor, who assigned her some movies to watch: Wim Wender’s Alice in the Cities, Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon were among them. And then, she mused. “I spent that summer flipping through old holiday albums and just seeing if this was a world I was interested in exploring on screen. I was thinking about it for a long time, but I didn’t realise I would be sitting and thinking about it for quite that long.” It was worth the wait. Earlier this year, Aftersun made its splash in Cannes and became the break-out hit of the festival.

If Aftersun was simply the naturalistic drama it first appears to be, it would be a very fine film. What makes it extraordinary are the increasingly impressionistic elements that Wells filters in. Between naturalistic scenes, we get haunting ellipses and mysterious glimpses of a young woman on a nightclub dancefloor. These images initially appear to be a flashback to Calum meeting Sophie’s mother for the first time, but eventually reveal themselves to be more complex – Nic Roeg-like, even – in their colliding of time and space.

“It was sometimes tempting to make that naturalistic drama about a father and a daughter on holiday,” Wells tells us from her studio in New York. “I didn't know if all [my visual ideas] would work, but I couldn't really help myself, which is ever my problem.” The intersection of time and memory is of particular interest to her. “The films that I like are often the ones that collapse fantasy and reality and space and time through sound, through images, through music.” Wong Kar Wai, Chantal Akerman and Terence Davies are some of the filmmakers she cites during our chat. “It's just what I find so fun about filmmaking,” she says, “and what I think filmmaking, specifically as a medium, really lends itself to.”

It’s heartening to see a young filmmaker with the nerve to drive the emotional heart of their story almost entirely visually, although anyone who’s seen Wells’s near-wordless short films like Tuesday (2015) and Laps (2016) will know this is very much her MO. “I love how much you can express without saying too much,” she says. “I think those shorts gave me some confidence in doing that.”

The results are lucid and powerfully emotional but Wells doesn’t seem too worried if audiences don’t follow every nuance. “I'm crystal clear on what is happening in my films and why,” she explains, “but I learned through my short films that there was a gap between my understanding and the audience's understanding, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It allows a degree of interpretation; you can bring your own experiences to the film. My films are all ultimately about feeling, so I think that space to interpret is good.”

Gaps in understanding also exist between Aftersun’s protagonists. The film is extremely wise about the fact that, as children, we understand little about our parents’ inner lives. “I think for kids, up until a certain point, our parents, and all adults in our lives really – teachers, football coaches – they just seem to perform a certain function in your life. It’s only when you're older that the door creaks ever so slightly open and you start to perceive them as people who have these different interests and have their own path, their own life outside of the role they were to you.”

As mentioned above, Aftersun was seven years in the making. We won’t have to wait so long for Wells’s next film, will we?

“Probably,” she says.

We hope not.

“I hope not too," she says, "but I am also not going to put too much pressure on myself. I'm very much all in when I work and I want to make sure that whatever is next is something I'm willing to commit to as much as I have this. So no, I'm not writing yet, I'm trying to enjoy the moment and enjoy sharing the experience of sharing the film with the team who made it. I hope it's not seven years, but I wouldn't count it out either.”

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Aftersun is released in cinemas 18 Nov by MUBI