The month of the notoriously heavy-hitters continues...
Cinebuffs Recommends
It took into nearly my twenties - the belief that flights to summer holiday destinations only flew at night. One of my parents' minor parenting indiscretion bubbles was burst when booking my own holidays as an older teenager, only to find you could fly in the daytime as well.
Okay, it was a good degree more expensive, but if it meant us being dropped of by a coach at three in the morning, or spend another week in Pwllheli Caravan Park for the chronically bewildered, then fuck it, I could sleep the whole first day. Get me on that plane *yawn*
And hit oh so very heavy this does. Not many of us of a certain age remember a time when you could record your holiday on video for posterity. The closest I can come to this is in the 1970's when these snapshots of familiarity became more and more meaningful the more often you looked back on them. Done too often and these still images become like a picture of you that you were never really in, more just a snippet of a time that is as hazy as it is romantic and wistful.
If you were very lucky, those memories progressively ravaged by time were perpetually happy ones. Most holiday memories are. Not all, of course.
The script is excellent, plotting and pacing both whipcrack smart and for a newcomer this has all the signs of a very promising career for Charlotte Wells. The melancholy saturates the entire project, and you may be waiting for the hammer to fall and possibly even be disappointed by a denouement it deserves but ultimately lacks. Close enough to everyman to appreciate, burying itself deeply into the subconscious of father and daughter and the relationship they share.
Beautifully shot and like a favourite snapshot of a family holiday, this will live long in the photo album of your mind.
Comments