We never know people as well as we think we do. No matter how close we get to someone else, or how honest they are to us about what makes them tick, there will always be this invisible wall that will prevent total understanding from taking place. In the moment, it’s possible to overlook this and just take joy out of being with that person, getting to share experiences with them and connect with as much of them as can make it through that wall. But as they drift apart, as people inevitably do for one reason or another, it eventually reaches a point where all that is left is the memory. Those imperfect, incomplete moments that have already been captured. It can be a source of great comfort, or possibly great pain, to reflect on those moments as a means of reconnecting with that person, albeit asymmetrically, but recollection is a funny thing. It’s not always as we remember it.
Between seeing Paul Mescal in two other films this year with Foe (boring dross) and All Of Us Strangers (good until it succumbed to Bury Your Gays), and having watched a completely different film this year about a young father connecting with his daughter that was written and directed by a different woman named Charlotte, this one has been on my radar for a while now. It’s a deceptively straightforward story, following Mescal’s Calum and Frankie Corio as his daughter Sophie on their holiday to Turkey. In-the-moment footage of them spending leisure time is intercut with MiniDV holiday film and a skittering slideshow showing an older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) at an underground rave.
All the footage taken together creates an excavation of memory, taking factual documentation like the in-universe video camera footage and the sunkissed nostalgia of the regular footage to show Sophie’s remembrance of this happy time… as best as she can manage. Memory isn’t foolproof, and the psychological tinges to the visual presentation allow for a certain ambiguity in what’s being shown. Even the camera footage can’t tell the whole story, both in a general sense in that what is presented for a camera tends to be only one side of a larger picture, and more specifically because what Sophie sees of her dad is a mostly-constructed façade that he puts up to hide the pain he’s really dealing with.
Of all the coming-of-age films I’ve covered on here, this one feels like it’s got closest to the vulnerability of parental figures. One of the core moments in that progression of growing up is the realisation that the very same people that you had spent your whole life up to that point convinced were all-powerful and able to make everything right… are just people. People who go through the same emotional turmoil that their children do, but have to at least give the impression that they have everything together. A teacher that struggles to follow their own advice ends up making it tougher for the ones they’re trying to advice to take their lessons seriously.
And in the case of Calum, we get one of the most quietly soul-crushing depictions of depression I’ve seen in a minute. The impulsive decisions, the feelings of disconnect from those around him, no matter how familiar, the private breakdowns… fucking hell, I can see why Paul Mescal has been such a hot property since this initially came out, as he is basically a human-sized open wound barely being held together and refusing to heal.
The film craft here does a tremendous job of strengthening
that showing of pain and Sophie’s retroactive attempts to connect with it. DP
Gregory Oke, in-between the more clever bits of camera framing, douses the
holiday footage in bright saturated colours, employing an almost-literal
rose-coloured filter to everything to make it shine that much more. Blair
McClendon’s editing creates this drifting effect, like a real-time
sorting-through of memories, allowing all the different camera stocks and
visual styles to mesh together seamlessly. The Under Pressure sequence might be
one of the most powerful moments of any film I’ve reviewed on here, even if it
took me a second go-through to really get my head around it (good thing I saw this on rental at home).
This is a technically impressive and heart-wrenching feat of psychological cinema. It’s an exploration of memory, both as an abstract concept and as a tangible thing that can be trawled through, that speaks to something quite tragic but also unifying about the pain we hide from others and subsequently try to find in others. It doesn’t directly invoke death at any point, but the emotions it conjures up are reminiscent of the ’was there something I could have done?’ brooding that often accompanies the loss of a loved one. Because, in its own way, loss of contact can be just as devastating as a final departure.
To put it more simply, this film was designed to make audiences want to call their parents afterwards. Tell them you love them, you care about them, and with any luck, implant the idea that they can share their pain with you if they need to. I’ll admit it, once I was done watching this, I immediately went up to my mum in the next room and told her exactly that. We as people tend to not really appreciate what we have, as incomplete as it is, until it’s no longer in our grasp. And if there’s one thing I’m taking away from this film, it’s that I should spend more time appreciating the people around me while I still can.
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