The flawed inheritance of love: three views of fathers and daughters in contemporary cinema
Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun”, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “El ser querido” look at three different stages and three distinct emotional forms of the father-daughter relationship. In one, a daughter returns to the past to try to understand her father; in another, two sisters carry the weight of the past into their present relationships; in the third, a father and daughter meet again after many years and reopen old grievances.
When does a person really begin to know their father? When do they truly understand him, that is? When their childhood admiration for him fades? When, as adults, they notice his weaknesses? Or when, tracing the fractures in their own life, they find that every path leads back to the same man?
What is most interesting when thinking about the father-daughter relationship is that it does not end with childhood. Years pass, people change, fathers grow old, daughters build lives of their own, yet the emotional bond formed in childhood resurfaces at the most unexpected moments of adulthood.
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