At the beginning of 2019, a college student ranked their top 10 movies of 2018. About one year later, a college student wrote about their favorite movies of 2019. Except this time, it was in the format of an awards show. But after the pandemic hit and they barely saw any movies that came out in 2020, the prestigious annual tradition went into slumber. Rumors circulated of it returning the next year, but alas they never came to fruition. But now, finally, the most important moment in all film discussion has returned. Tell your friends, tell your family. Yell it out into the streets.
IT IS NOW TIME FOR THE 2022 JSCARS.
But once again, I am changing the format of how this works. I have selected a group of movies that are my favorite of the year, and I will be publishing a short article with thoughts for each of them. These are going to be vaguely in alphabetical order but don’t expect me to stick to that too strictly. Once all of them have been released, I will release a final article discussing my thoughts on the year overall, as well as having a few extra categories with their own winners. And at the end of it, I will finally reveal which of the movies I’ve discussed has won the prestigious Jscar for Best Picture.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the first nominee for Best Picture.
“There’s this feeling, once you leave where you grew up. That you don’t totally belong there again.”
A little while ago my family dug up a basket of tapes that was sitting at my grandparents’ house. We were curious what exactly was on them so we brought out a video camera and randomly picked one of the tapes to put in and watch. After a bit of an arduous process of hooking it all up to the TV, we were finally greeted by my very own 1st birthday party. Everyone quickly rushed in for the novelty of viewing versions of relatives almost 22 years younger than they are now. And it was certainly entertaining for me to see many family members younger than I have any real memory of them ever being. But as I continued to watch and the video continued to be replayed, another feeling began to creep up inside, gnawing at me. The feeling that if I studied this video enough, examined how I acted so close to my own birth or how the people around me acted, I could finally understand some new truth about myself or my family. That some key moment that would explain everything was hidden on that one video tape.
Aftersun tells the tale of Sophie, an 11 year old girl taking a summer vacation in Turkey with her father Calum. Over the course of the movie we learn that Calum is separated from Sophie’s mother and despite his best efforts, the fact that he’s not particularly happy with the way his life has turned out becomes extremely apparent. As Sophie enjoys her summer vacation and makes discoveries about herself and the world around her, Calum struggles to balance being a loving father to Sophie and his depressive state. Throughout it all, the two of them film each other using a MiniDV camera that Sophie brought along with her, with footage from the camera interspersed throughout. It’s clear that someone, at some point in time, is watching these videos back in the future. They too are searching for meaning.
There’s a lot of media out there that deals with the topic of nostalgia or reflecting on the past, but few depict it in as haunting a manner as Aftersun does. Several times throughout the movie it feels like something major is about to happen, some life-altering event that you could point to and confidently say “That’s the moment where everything changed.” And yet it never comes. Despite what both are going through inevitably placing a few strains on the relationship, Sophie and Calum remain a loving father and daughter the entire time. And yet the looming shadow cast by the videotapes is unavoidable. There must be something somewhere.
And to cap off this haunted feeling, Aftersun comes with one of the most emotional endings I’ve seen in a long time, let alone out of the movies released in 2022. An ending that may hint at some answers, but doesn’t fully give the satisfaction of a solution. No one in the movie is going to be able to figure out what happened via the video tapes. I can’t figure out what happened via my own video tapes. No matter how hard we try to revisit our past and fix things or make sense of it all, it’s impossible to ever have the full picture.
Some questions will forever remain unanswered.
(Don’t want to ruin the ending but hope you enjoyed this and please check out the rest when I post them okay thanks bye love u)