‘Under Pressure’: the deep influence of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury on ‘Aftersun’
A cinematic spokesperson for the contemporary mental health crisis, Charlotte Wells’ extraordinary debut film, Aftersun, is a pertinent exploration of how memory and identity interweave. Making us nostalgic for lives we’ve never experienced, the story dances across timelines, following the recollection of a middle-aged woman who is trying to piece together an impression of her father using home video footage of a holiday the pair shared 20 years earlier.
Bottling an ethereal sense of melancholy, which makes reflecting on the digital grain of early 2000s technology both heartwarming and sorrowful, Aftersun explores the close relationship between a young girl and her enigmatic father, unknowingly sharing their last holiday together. Suffering from an unidentified mental health condition brought on by a mysterious past trauma, the masculine fragility of Calum, played by the endearing Paul Mescal, sits at the centre of Wells’ quiet tragedy.
Much like any childhood holiday, which is remembered with only flickers of highlights and minute details, Aftersun is a scrapbook of unfurling moments that radiates both grief and joy, with the co-dependent feelings being inextricable from one another. This is best illustrated in the film’s momentous final sequence, in which Calum tries to encourage his daughter Sophie, played by Frankie Corio, to dance to ‘Under Pressure’ by Queen and David Bowie at an outdoor bar.
Amid this sequence, Calum’s dancing is intercut with a strobe-lit fantasy where an adult version of Sophie wrestles through a nightclub crowd to meet her father as he was on holiday. Silently screaming at him whilst trying to physically reach out to his body, the chaos of the sequence “in which reality and something a little bit outside of reality intersect,” according to Wells, is accentuated by ‘Under Pressure’s’ unstable deterioration and Bowie’s yearning vocals.
Underscoring the conflict of Calum and Sophie’s relationship, which pushes and pulls between moments of earnest transparency and fragile self-defence, the sound of the fractured pop song, sung by Bowie and Freddie Mercury, clashes and clangs with two opposing vocals. Embodying dual ‘characters’ in the song, Bowie is the voice of hopelessness, singing “Pressure pushin’ down on me,” whilst Mercury replies, “Pray tomorrow gets me higher”, his tone coloured with a brighter sense of optimism.
This lyrical battle intensifies in composer Oliver Coates’ mix of the original song, with the vocals of both singers being isolated and accompanied by the impassioned strings of a dour cello, accentuating the conflict inherent within the original song as well as the desperate mental health battle of the protagonist. Indeed, as Mercury pleads, “Why can’t we give love that one more chance?” and Bowie responds, “Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word…love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves,” we may as well be experiencing the colliding thoughts of Calum wrestling with his own identity.
Despite how fittingly ‘Under Pressure’ suits the emotional finale of Aftersun, Charlotte Wells has since admitted that the song’s inclusion came about by coincidence as she and Coates were searching for an appropriate song. Perfectly complementing the visuals, Wells quickly sought the rights to use the song and tasked Coates with mixing the track to better accentuate the underlying soul beneath the pop song.
As the filmmaker stated in a conversation with MUBI: “The score that Oliver wrote for it is doing a lot of work too, in terms of meeting it at points and working against it at others, there’s that beautiful moment where Freddie Mercury’s vocals give way to Oliver’s cello, and Oliver’s cello takes over…I wrote this diagram that was like two waveforms almost and where they both intersect…I think it was useful in illustrating to him how much I anticipated that track evolving, that it wasn’t just one thing”.
Like a swirling organism of conflicting emotions, ‘Under Pressure’ transitions from being a simple pop tune to a complex, yearning track made up of echoing vocals and dramatic strings, like one’s inner thoughts fighting for attention. Suddenly, the song’s sentiment shifts, becoming unplaceable and unpredictable as the lyrics of both Bowie and Mercury decline and grow in and out of focus, cutting each other off and preventing closure, creating a complex soundscape that mirrors Sophie’s own lack of clarity when it comes to the identity of her father.
Appearing joyous in the scene, ‘Under Pressure’ helps to strip away the artifice of Calum’s smile and access the dark ruminations underneath. An unknowable entity, Calum dances an arms-reach from Sophie’s grasp in the nightclub fantasy, with strobe lights preventing her and the audience from gaining a tangible impression of him. Both a celebration of their relationship and a painful swansong of Calum’s unspoken torment, the pair’s last dance is one last moment of unadulterated bliss before their time in the sun fades, and the realities of their life consume them.
