Back to Back 38 - Summertime Blues
Comparing recent female-directed films of sad summertime childhoods
Estiu 1993 [Summer 1993] (2017) - writer/director Carla Simón
Aftersun (2022) - writer/director Charlotte Wells
Genre: Retrospective dramas about childhood summers past
A sad resentment will smolder one day
And then that summer feeling's gonna haunt you
And that summer feeling's gonna taunt you
And then that summer feelin' is gonna hurt you one day in your life
Jonathan Richman, “That Summer Feeling”
I don't know Carla Simón, and nearly every interview I've read with her is conducted by a cinema illiterate who just wants to talk about her life story, which is simply an invitation to tell the same story as in the film but not so well.
It makes one feel like screaming at the interviewer: you already know what she experienced as a child! “How did it feel to lose your mother so young?” It's in the goddamn film! What can saying a few awkward words to a half-asleep journo convey about that experience that isn't already conveyed fully by the movie?
Ask her instead about what her film influences are, how she went about the process of portraying a child's experience, what it was like to work with actors so young. Anything but the same life story that's already in the film but now instead of a vibrant lived experience is a rather dull and prosaic spoken anecdote.
So I'm going to have to make my own surmises here. I think the structure and concept are inspired above all by Robert Bresson, the idea of a spare austere minimal-emotional presentation - highly appropriate to Catalans who are often decent and kind people, but not very emotionally demonstrative - which builds toward an emotional release, as with Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). The comparison betwen a donkey and a little girl isn't as far-fetched as all that, since this little girl, Frida (Laia Artigas) isn't very keen on expressing herself and we need to do most of the work in understanding what she's experiencing.
Another reference might be Yasujirō Ozu, whose small domestic dramas also take a low-altitude point-of-view. This low-angle viewpoint is also taken here at the start when the camera is just over the shoulder of this small child in soft-focus evocation of the St Joan fireworks of June 23 1993.
In terms of the documentary-style hand-held camera and the simple scene setups the reference might be Ken Loach. The simplicity, which Loach developed especially for his non-professional cast in most of his films, is especially called for here when the two stars are six and four years old. Simón creates a small miracle here in the naturalism with which these two little girls portray their characters. At almost excactly the same time as this was being filmed, Sean Baker was doing something just as miraculous with his tiny cast in The Florida Project (2017).
If you give just the story premise - young girl tries to cope with the unexpected death of her mother from AIDS and moves with her aunt and uncle to the countryside - you think, yeah, TV movie. Sunday afternoon, lots of tinkly piano music, needy little girl actress bawling out lines like "Mommy I miss you!" This concept of the story will not lead you to imagine the Frida of this film, who covers her confusion in a wary stare and whose pronouncements are terse and uncommunicative. There will be no music soundtrack either, tinkly piano or otherwise.
Right from the start we see the adults consoling each other, asking each other how they're feeling. But nobody thinks to ask Frida how she's doing. Instead, afraid to reveal to her what's actually happened to her mother, they talk around her and offer her food and prayers (particularly her religious grandmother) but never try to console her directly. At best, they expect her to talk through her feelings with them, when she clearly has no practice in articulating herself or her emotions. So it's not neglect, in fact her family treat her with patience and compassion, but it is an emotional distance that in its own way can be very harmful. And so so characteristic of the Catalan character.
One of the few valuable gems about the film's creation to come out of all the interviews and the tell-me-is-this-really-true nonsense is this description of the kind of dynamic Simón was seeking in her lead characters:
we tried [lead actress] Laia with another little girl and they became friends, I’m like, “This shouldn’t happen.” [laughs] When we put Paula [Robles, who plays Anna] and Laia together, we saw that it was really a power relationship, kind of like the sisters’ relationship I was looking for.
Interview with Carla Simón on Moveablefest.com
So this was to be a Jane Austen-style power play between cousins in a country house, except instead of competing for some wealthy heir, they are competing for something they don't even understand. And they are tiny, six and four years old, barely able to conceive of the competition within them. And it's true that little Anna is mostly sweet and welcoming, right away calling Frida her "new sister" and wanting to play together constantly. It's Frida who from her confused unarticulated incomprehensible grieving is the prickly one.
For all the influences I infer from French, Japanese and British cinema masters, there's also something profoundly Catalan about this film. Perhaps the director's obsession with recreating the limited point-of-view of a child doesn't permit her to take in the panoramic sweep of the countryside around, and we only see the farmhouse and the trees surrounding it. But we know we’re here, in rural Catalonia.
But the village and its folklore are completely present, and in true Bressonian fashion the traditional festivities stand as an index of Frida's spiritual state. At first the "big heads" (caps grossos) are offputting to her; when they come to be integrated into the local festival at the end of the summer, a certain arc will be completed.
— INTERMISSION —
It seems natural to follow up a discussion of Carla Simón's Summer 1993 with a film taking an extremely similar premise but quite radically different approach, Charlotte Wells' Aftersun.
Both films are written and directed by young female writer-directors (Wells b 1987, Simón b 1986), both are debut feature films, both feature semi-autobiographical meditations on the shattered emotions of growing up with absent parents, both are set in that 1990s Mediterranean sunshine whose radiance offers a bask of warm nostalgia, but the stark contents of the story upend that warmth with bitter reality.
The moderate differences in circumstance are in the age of the protagonist, making this later tale truly a coming-of-age story as well as a coming-to-terms-with-loss drama, and the fact that the parent grieved for is present in this film's main storyline, and grieved for only in retrospect. So it becomes a story, more than the grief of the protagonist and her slow healing, of the parent whose loss is grieved for. In this tale, then, the daughter is more than anything a witness to her father's anguish, capable at age 11 of understanding the struggles, whereas the 6-year-old Frida of the earlier story is completely oblivious to her mother's alienation and even the circumstances of her death.
The radically different approach is in the approach to filmmaking itself. Clara Simón takes clear references from such masters of austere cinema as Bresson and Ozu, whose apparent simplicity masks great subtlety in psychological and visually-presented emotion; Charlotte Wells, by contrast, seeks to use clearly indicated breaks from the conventions of realism in order to highlight the horrific alienation that the protagonist's father is experiencing. References for this manner of filmmaking include mid-period David Lynch and Gaspar Noé, though these excursions into expressionist style are by no means as radical in Aftersun.
But there are many many others who use such out-of-realism sequences to unlock emotional content. So when A.O. Scott of the NYT says that Wells is "very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium's often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling" he is of course bullshitting wildly, as is his wont, but the basic point stands that the filmmaker's work here is devoted to this process of exposing and portraying the unspoken, showing and not telling the sad stark emotional despair under the carefree holiday narrative. Images of being submerged fade into dance sequences strobing at a club, giving a clear sense that dad Calum is drowning in something.
One reference that's made pretty explicit in the film is the work of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, whose book of poems is one of the only things the protagonist's father Calum (Paul Mescal) carries with him. Wells has said that Tait's film Blue Black Permanent (1992), a reminscence of the director's late mother, is highly influential in her decisions in how to approach her own story. I haven't seen the film but intend to do so as soon as possible.
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It's never made explicit how old the adult Sophie is as she watches the old VHS tapes, steps on her dad's Turkish carpet, shares a birthday kiss as she recalls her father's 31st birthday. But it just as well could be her 31st birthday, a moment for remembering a father lost very young and where he was at that moment in his life. Clearly it was not a good place - for all his efforts to do "mindfulness" (as it later was called), practice Tai-Chi, and simulate the demeanour of a happy and contented father, there's something deeply troubling going on.
There are so many moments in the film where this overwhelming depression and self-loathing courses through him, only barely glimpsed by the camera and underplayed as moments in the narrative. How he strides in front of a bus or stands precariously on the balcony railing: extreme recklessness and possible death wish. The way he spits toothpaste on the mirror, as if trying to erase himself. His inability to take simple joy in simple corny family stuff like happy birthday wishes or your daughter's faltering karaoke performance.
One enlightening contrast between this film and Summer 1993 is in the music. There's very little music in the Simón film, following te Bressonian principle that music should be sparsely used and mostly diegetic. But in Wells' film the music is always there to take the emotional temperature and adorn the very simple action with a texture, a meaning beyond the apparent meaning (which is of course what music can do best of all).
REM’s “Losing My Religion” and the traditional “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” seem not to have so much in common, but when offered as a token of a daughter’s love and met with suffering anguish, they actually can come to mean the same thing. So it is that other musical fragments play into the drama and bring out its jagged edges and straining tensions.