London Film Festival 2022: AFTERSUN, JEONG-SUN & ARGENTINA 1985

From stories of South Korean factory workers to Scots on a Turkish holiday, the London Film Festival is back for another year. Our first despatch covers a military coup and, just maybe, one of the great scenes I’ve ever seen. Read on for more…

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Ever wished to see Paul Mescal as Daddy? (Steady now). Well, writer and director Charlotte Wells’ debut feature gives you it, in her enormously impressive and emotional slow-burn of a feature debut. Aftersun takes place during a holiday to Turkey between Mescal’s Calum and his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio), as the older Frankie looks back on the trip, searching for clues.

A film about memory and the unreliable, misremembered meaning we find in it, Wells – to stick with the theme – is careful with the information she gives us. Details about Calum are incomplete, as scattered as the strobe lighting that’s shattered across the film and culminates in a crescendo like no other (more in a moment). And Mescal – leapfrogging not just the years before we’d expect him to take on Dad roles, but also the obligatory years in which he’s meant to build up his repertoire so we feel comfortable proclaiming him as one of the best actors around today – provides the performance to match. Not unlike Connell from his breakout role in Normal People, Mescal conveys an inscrutability that beckons you in rather than wards you off, full of small inflections that hint at deeper demons momentarily breaking through. But if Mescal’s performance seems beyond his years, his co-star, the 11-year-old Corio, matches him, with as natural a performance as you’ll see this side of a home video.

You have to do some digging. Calum’s troubles are there but we’re not sure what they are. The nature of his relationship with Sophie’s mother and the backstory of his and Sophie’s relationship remain concealed. Clues are provided but the detective work is yours.  Since I saw it, specific moments have been seared into my mind like the sunburn Calum tries to ensure Sophie avoids. There’s the simple creativity of framing a conversation between Calum and Sophie with them both reflected in the TV screen, while Calum’s reflected again in the mirror next to it, in between which his holiday reading sits to offer you more clues. Or a camera pan which transports you from one time and place to another, decades apart, utterly seamlessly – bridging present pain with the old memories from which it stems.

You get time to unpack all this at your leisure over the 98-minute runtime. The pace is slow, with Wells lingering on seemingly insignificant moments that a less confident first-time director would’ve bottled and shaved in the editing room. But the pace enables its emotion to creep up on you slowly, and before you know it you’re entirely within its grip.

It culminates – and I type this considered, with the threat of hyperbole staring me down – in perhaps the most purely cinematic scene I’ve ever seen. You’ll know it when you see it. The Under Pressure moment melds memory and time and swells the heart in a way that only film can. Guillermo del Toro said film is so hard to encompass with words because “what makes it work lies beyond the words and beyond the story, the plot and the characters. It’s purely a moment when the light hits, the camera moves, and something moves magically.”

You can read a book at your own pace. You can take your time parsing each section of a painting. But a film is paced for you. You’ve no control. It’s like riding white water rapids; you just have to hold on tight. And as Aftersun reaches its crescendo, make sure your grip is firm.

Jeong-sun (Jinhye Jeong)

Have you accidentally sent someone a video to someone you weren’t meant to? Or, worse, has someone else shared something private of you without your consent? Jeong-Sun explores this topic, following a South Korean factory worker whose life is shaken after a private video is shared. It’s an interesting and uniquely modern premise, but writer-director Jihye Jeong squanders it by lunging head-first into melodrama.

When the story gets going and that inciting plot point arrives, Jihye initially evokes the resulting sense of embarrassment well. This is helped by a savvy scripting decision in the type of video that’s shared: it’s private but not lewd. It’s intimate but there’s no wrongdoing. This makes the consequences primarily social, creating room for Jihye to explore the titular Jeong-Sun’s feelings, rather than delving into a litigious or procedural story. But while this room is created, it’s not properly explored.

That sense of embarrassment, the crux of the film, is a long time coming. Jihye tosses out the storytelling axiom of getting your ‘inciting incident’ in near the start of the story. Instead, she takes her time building her characters and the relationships between them. Which would be fine, if Jeong-Su’s life wasn’t purposefully unremarkable. And once the video is shared and the story really starts, the film tailspins into melodrama.

The working culture of South Korea can be intense (and exploitative), as fellow LFF film Next Sohee portrays. This provides some justification for Jeong-Sun’s hyperbolic reaction to the shared video. Status and hierarchy are important social structures, the transgression of which can have huge consequences. But perhaps this is unique to South Korean culture (eyes open as I potentially lay my cultural ignorance bare) because, to me, Jeong-Sun’s reaction to the video leak seems wildly over the top. If you enter this film halfway through, you’d think a tragedy had struck, on par with the death of a child – not of your coworkers having seen an embarrassing video.

You’ll find a more embarrassing clip on every third Instagram thumb scroll than this video. That it’s seemingly being shared on every street corner – and that people would be interested in the first place – doesn’t add up or, at least, feels out of date.

The blame can’t be laid at Geum-Soon Kim‘s door, who plays Jeong-Sun. She turns in a strong performance, bringing an endearing quality to the quiet factory worker until the script demands she goes too far, and we reach a crescendo of screeching. You can make out Jihye’s target. The film’s reaching to stay something about a stilted and lonely life which needs a change and, taken perhaps too literally in the film, a drive. But those dots aren’t connected – perhaps because they’re not drawn clearly enough in the first place.

Argentina 1985 (Santiago Mitre)

Rarely do dramatisations of real-life courtroom dramas find the space to be as funny and full of flair as Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985. Led by a rousing performance from the Argentine leading man Ricardo Darín as lead prosecutor Julio Strassera, Argentina, 1985 is a dramatisation of the trial which put nine of the highest ranking officers of Argentina’s dictatorship on trial – otherwise known as the Trial of the Juntas.

It starts as it means to go on: by deftly bringing humour into a story of real and recent crimes against humanity. In a noirish rain-driven car, close-ups on Julio show him keeping an eye on someone, as onscreen typewriter texts explains the time and place. But Julio’s really keeping an eye on his younger daughter – and enlisting his precocious son, Javi (Santiago Armas Estevarena) to help – as he’s worried the boyfriend might be a fascist spy. The shifts from humour to historical heartbreak ramp up throughout the film, and director Mitre handles them with ease. 

Darín performance as Strassera sits at the heart of the film. It’s all muscular charm in public and vulnerable charm in private, as the Prosecutor worries whether he’s up to the job and what it’ll mean not just for his family, but also for the country, if he fails. The litmus test of any historical drama is whether the stakes still engage you when you know the outcome.

The film feels light on its feet, skipping along at a jaunty pace with a contemporary pop soundtrack, as though the tone itself is imbued by the zip of the enthusiastic young lawyers Strassera and Deputy Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani) recruit to their prosecuting team. But when it comes to the big moments, it doesn’t skimp on the details, told by witnesses during the trial, of the fascists’ crimes and inhumanity.

Deft direction, a strong central performance and a well-walked tone tightrope turns this potentially heavy historical drama into a fun, thrilling courtroom drama – while honouring the victims whose struggle for justice remains ongoing.