“Guernica” by Picasso was a piece of art I learned about in high school. I stared at a picture of the work for about an hour; there was something about the seemingly haphazard placement and senseless characters that somehow haunted me. It is a visually compelling piece, however, I could have never guessed the pain implemented with each brush stroke.
Picasso painted this based on the bombing of Guernica, Spain by Hilter’s regime. This was a devastating catastrophe with little to no actual military value. Pure meaningless destruction. The context of the piece is often missed, leaving only what we can see, the art.
Unless you are an art connoisseur or have a special gift of interpretation, I highly doubt you would find the backstory apparent in the work alone. Ultimately the visual is simply a hodgepodge of white figures mixed up on a black background. It is a visually appealing piece of artwork. You can tell there is a story, but you just can’t tell what that story is.
That is how it felt to watch “Aftersun.”
Cinematically, “Aftersun” is a piece of artwork, but I would dare say that calling this a “good movie” is a bold claim.
“Aftersun” follows an 11-year-old “Sophie,” played by Frankie Corio, while on vacation in Turkey with her father “Calum,” played by Paul Mescal. The movie follows the pair as Mescal’s character tries to create an idealized childhood experience for his daughter while dealing with his own battles with single parenting.
The director uses slow and controlled camera movements, lingering shots and a unique color grading palette which increases the cinematic draw but does very little for the overall watchability or plot.
The pacing of the movie is slow, as if it is in no rush to expose its intentions. It creates an immersive experience because you feel like you are living each moment of the day with the characters. The director even takes elongated moments to exaggerate otherwise overlooked feelings and details.
The filming style almost feels rudimentary. Excluding complex shots and trading them in for simple panning, jump cuts and J-cuts. The slow sequences were rudely interrupted by jarring jumps cuts to, what I assume, are flashbacks.
The color grading is a combination of both retro and stylings with a modern edge. There are a lot of primary colors that have been dulled as if they were shot on an old film camera. I noticed I spent more time watching the colors on screen rather than the content going on. It was like watching paint dry, a beautiful shade of paint ㅡ but paint drying nonetheless.
For me, this movie had a greater impact visually than the storyline or plot goes. We have this misconception in cinema that if you can fool the eye into finding something captivating, the viewers will somehow overlook the boring nature of the story. “Aftersun” accomplished something captivating, but left the entertainment of the story something to be desired.
It gives me my own flashbacks to cinematography class, being shamed by the “true” film kids for liking the “Fast and Furious” franchise rather than the stylings of “Life Aquatic” by Wes Anderson. “Aftersun” did a lot of great things using film style, but just because a movie uses a new technique or unusual pacing doesn’t make the movie as a whole, revolutionary. Plot matters.
