◎City-linked
1
"Holiday After the Sun" is the feature film debut of Scottish female director Charlotte Wells, which premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews. The director admits that this is an "emotional autobiography", inspired by a summer vacation she spent with her father in the 90s.
"Holiday After the Sun" reconstructs a journey between daughter and father in Turkey, explores the emotional relationships and incomprehensible themes between families, and reminds me of the life experience of Polish director Kieślowski: his 17-year-old daughter is studying abroad, and every time he writes to her daughter, she does not understand or care about what he talks about, just as he was rebellious against his father, and when he is old, he discovers that his father has a great influence on him. He thought bitterly that when his daughter grew up and he was no longer there, she might suddenly understand what her father told her in his letter when she was 17 years old, understand that her life could not escape her father's influence, and understand what kind of person her father was, but it was too late, he was no longer alive.
Life is often like this: when children are young, their parents are in their prime, but children cannot see and do not know what their parents are doing. When they grow up and face their increasingly resigned and aging parents, they will look impatient. This is a law of life, but also the sadness of human beings: everything happens at the moment you don't know, you won't understand it until after the event has passed, and you can only sigh "this can be a memory, but it was already at that time."
2
"Holiday After the Sun" is not only a memory of a father-daughter emotional journey, but also reveals the theme of incomprehension between the family: the seemingly happy Turkish summer trip, re-examined by time, the original warmth is behind the sadness. The father who is sunny on the surface and cares for his daughter actually has an unknown vulnerability, discomfort, and depression. The 11-year-old daughter didn't see it, maybe she saw it, but she couldn't feel it, she couldn't understand it. The father also deliberately hid his depression and pain from his daughter. The shock of the film lies in this contrast.
The film opens with a DV picture of a mosaic, followed by a gloomy middle-aged woman on the dance floor with her eyes open and closed under the strobe, and then cuts to the 35mm image of the little girl and her father entering the tourist bus, suggesting that this is a reconstruction of this past journey by 30-year-old daughter Sophie. She has to penetrate DV pictures, polaroid photos, TV screens, mirrors, glass, sea surface and other multiple media, remove the fog of memory like a mysterious dream, and strive to see clearly what kind of person her father is, why is there a dark side that she did not know back then?
The director abandons plot display and dramatic conflict, starting from the female gaze, through local framing, changing composition, uncontrolled close-ups close to the faces of the characters and other techniques to make this trip to Turkey a female sensory experience full of sight, touch and taste, in order to restore the sense of scene of memory. Reminiscing about the bits and pieces of her father in her daughter's eyes at that time, in order to recall that summer, "the most precious and long-lasting thing is the indescribable but incomparably vast emotional and emotional atmosphere, the fresh and warm but dusty life experience, and the inevitable hatred and trance that everyone will inevitably realize later."
The trip to Turkey in the film, as the opening stuttering DV scene suggests, is not blindly happy and beautiful, but also has an indescribable indifference and alienation, which is a true portrayal of the father-daughter relationship at that time. At that time, the father and daughter were both at a delicate juncture in life: the daughter was 11 years old, at the junction between girls and adults, was in the adolescence of sexual consciousness, full of longing for the adult world, she would subconsciously fold clothes, look in the mirror, adjust the shoulder straps, peek at adult lovers by the pool, and secretly kiss with a little fat boy playing a game. She enjoys her father applying sunscreen or volcanic mud to herself, doing tai chi with her father, playing in the pool, diving, basking in the sun on the beach, and watching paragliding float in the sky. But she may be too focused on herself to see the other side of her father: when she shouts in the room, she can't see him painfully cutting the plaster cast on his feet across the wall; She couldn't see him standing on the edge of the balcony with his arms outstretched; She couldn't see him looking dead as he crossed the street, ignoring the speeding truck in front of him; On the night when the two quarreled over small things, she couldn't see him walking alone into the sea in the middle of the night...
His father is 30 years old, at the junction of youth and middle age, and has been groping for how father and daughter get along, and his overly complicated life experience (through the dialogue he communicates with his daughter and others, it can be seen that he was abused by his family and hurt by his hometown when he was a child, so he grew up alienated from his hometown and family, wandered alone in London, married and divorced at the age of 20, and his daughter and mother lived), making him sensitive, closed, and incompatible with the world around him. The age gap between him and his daughter is so small that he is mistaken for a sibling by other tourists. He tries to play the role of a good father, but his reckless youthful temperament interferes with him; Occasionally, he either sulked or completely abdicated his responsibilities. He seems easygoing, but he always shuts down without warning when Sophie needs him the most, and later feels guilty.
3
The director dares to use a perceptive and keen perception to explore the emotional opaque characters and the universal commonality hidden behind the story. And this ability has been shown in her previous three short films: "Subway Assault" tells the story of a woman who was sexually assaulted on the subway during rush hour; "Blue Christmas" tells the story of a haggard-faced bank debt collector who takes a vacation to avoid his wife's mental illness; "Tuesday" is the theme predecessor of "After the Sun Holiday", which tells the story of a daughter visiting her late father. The characters in these works are opaque characters, and without detailed background information, the audience cannot understand the person concretely. They are all struggling with negation, dissonance, and incomprehension in their emotional relationships.
The father of "Holiday After the Sun" is also an opaque character, and the director deliberately does not provide the audience with his background (for example, how did his marriage to Sophie's mother break down?). What is he currently doing? How are travel arrangements made? What was his personal condition before the trip and what was his mental condition while traveling? The most important thing, what happened to the father, did he die? ), but slowly unfolded the process of the father-daughter relationship from sweet happiness to sudden collapse: Sophie wanted to sing karaoke with her father in front of the public, but her autistic and estranged father naturally refused, and a quarrel broke out over this, and the two broke up unhappily, and her father staggered down the street towards the dark depths of the sea.
This scene condenses the development of the emotional relationship between father and daughter - the expression of love becomes a mutual cold eye and incomprehension: the father does not understand the excitement of the adolescent daughter, the daughter does not understand the world-weary autism of the father, and the two were previously harmonious on the surface, but in fact the gap is widening in all aspects. The scene ends with the father walking into the depths of the sea, and the screen goes dark for a few minutes, as long as his life, revealing the loss of control and collapse of the father-daughter relationship.
The second half of the film reveals this warm journey to Turkey, which is actually a cruel story of love and pain: the father, whose life is crumbling, carefully hides his collapse temporarily (but at any time reveals clues, but the daughter ignores it), tries to accompany his daughter, and tries his best to give her a good summer vacation. As the director said: "The father played by Paul Mesca is very hard to be the best he can do during this vacation, although he has many life problems that he is still facing, and he tries his best to be the best he can give to his daughter during this vacation." ”
It is precisely because mutual incomprehension is the truth of the father-daughter relationship, so the fatherly love shown by the father's hard work and clumsiness in the memories will be like a sharp axe that splits the frozen barrier, and has a strong impact on the adult Sophie and the audience. So much so that years later, when her father was no longer alive (a fact that can be naturally inferred), Sophie discovered that these memories had become an integral part of her life, and their meaning was finally revealed under her 30-year-old re-examination: at her father's age, and also a mother, she understood the weight of all her sorrow that she hid from her, and perhaps one day she would do the same in front of her children.
At the end of the film, the director bridges the gap between memories and reality with a dazzling but warm panning mirror, echoing the opening, and reconnecting the emotional relationship between father and daughter: the picture shakes away from Sophie, who waved goodbye to her father at the airport at the age of 11, to Sophie who watched this DV picture in the living room at the age of 30, and then continues to shake to the father who held the DV at the exit of the airport for a long time, and the last person turned his back and left lonely. In this 360-degree rotating shot, the director "crosses two media (DV and reality) and two times and spaces (past and present) through a simple scheduling, which is both a farewell and a reunion (Douban netizen language)". Therefore, this memory of Sophie, although like a fog and a dream, can most realistically bring her and the audience back to the scene of love over and over again. In this sense, this memory is so precious to Sophie (it manifests itself in a cascade of sensory experiences under the female gaze: DV images, Polaroid photographs, words left on postcards, floating paragliders, patterns and textures of Persian carpets, and every splash in the pool, the hissing of hammam steam...). ), so that as soon as she revisits it, she will re-enter that "scene".
As Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang puts it, "After the Sun Memory is a work of memory and a reflection on how memories are indelible and imprecise, how they torment us and let us down, but still the most precious thing we have left—perhaps even the only thing."