Writers: Sasha Nathwani and Helen Simmons
Director: Sasha Nathwani
Showing in the First Feature Competition of the London Film Festival 2024, Sasha Nathwani’s Last Swim is an encouraging debut told across a single day as a group of 18-year-old friends get their A-Level results and plan a celebration. Capturing the high of school leavers moving into a new phase of their life but with one last chance to relax together on a hot summer evening, Nathwani finds tension and an undercurrent of darkness in their perfect day.
Teenage Ziba plans a meticulous day of fun with her three best friends culminating in a meteor shower viewing that will set her up for the astrophysics degree she has been accepted for at UCL. But as the day runs to schedule, Ziba struggles to keep up, feeling her plans slip away but all the while refusing to admit the truth about her situation.
With a strong central performance from Deba Herkmat, Last Swim captures well the mixture of hope and fear, possibility and endings that summarise the mixed feelings on results day. Ziba’s perspective is consistently maintained as the character both tries to keep her agenda on track but slowly starts to embrace the random events and opportunities emerging from a developing devil-may-care attitude as the hours pass, discovering that real fun and real living happens between the lines of her fixed agenda.
Nathwani immerses the camera in the group, an extra friend who is continually wrapped in with Ziba, Tara, Shea and Murf, but also alert to the presence of young footballer Malcolm who remains an outsider of the core group. Nonetheless, whether sitting on Primrose Hill, walking along Haymarket or traveling in Shea’s small car, these friends are physically tight knit, and Nathwani brings the viewer into that connection and the easy intimacy that makes space for each other.
Hekmat is matched by Lydia Fleming (Tara), Jay Lycurgo (Merf), Solly McLeod (Shea) and Denzel Baidoo (Malcolm) who complete the pals, and there is a real sense of the close links they have formed as they ride bikes in the sun carefree but also when they rush to help and support on another in times of difficulty. But each retains an undercurrent of something not quite right in their wider lives, be it Ziba’s secret which the audience learns at the start, Malcolm’s football career or even Merf’s grief briefly alluded to on Primrose Hill.
Last Swim is sometimes a melancholy film but Nathwani’s conclusion show that the unexpected can also change everyone’s plans. With a strong set of characters, this may not be their last swim after all, perhaps Nathwani will drop in to see how they are all doing a few years from now.
Last Swim is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
