Ein Sommer in St. Tropez

The usual rap on French director David Hamilton is that he is a "pervert". Give me a break--if every man who still felt some twinge of attraction to girls this age (16-20 years old) were to drop dead tomorrow, only the most committed homosexuals would be left to re-populate the earth. This is a French movie so many of the actresses here may not be "legal" by American standards. But if "perverts" (and by that I mean men) really want to fantasize about barely underage high school girls, they can watch an innocuous 1980's French nudie movie like this and really use their imagination to create sexual scenarios, or they can get an American-made "barely legal" hardcore porn flick where a young-looking eighteen year old in pig-tails and a school uniform gets gang-sodomized and triple-penetrated and they only have to pretend she's a year or two younger. Which do you think is more harmful to society?

But the problem I have with David Hamilton is that if it were possible to fall asleep with an erection, his movies could no doubt induce it. They are languorously slow-paced even by French standards. They are like still photography (which was Hamilton's principal career) at 24 frames a second. Unlike "Bilitis", this movies makes no effort to have a plot or drama (which might be for the best if you've seen "Bilitis"). It's basically just endless shots of a gaggle of young French nymphs sleeping (often in nude), showering, skinny-dipping, sunbathing (usually naked), fixing each others hair (in various states of undress), or having topless, slow-motion pillow fights. But it's all a lot more boring than it sounds.

I can't really fault Hamilton's photography, but he REALLY overuses the soft-focus (at times I wanted to grab his camera, wipe all the vaseline off the lens, and pull the damn focus!). I CAN definitely fault his taste in music. I had to laugh at an earlier reviewer who said this movie could be used to treat sex offenders. It IS kind of like the "ludvico technique" in "A Clockwork Orange" in that you have this footage of tantalizing naked nubiles juxtaposed with truly nausea-inducing music (although at least you don't have the banal dialogue of "Bilitis"--there's no dialogue at all actually, just a lot of giggling). Sure, this would probably work on sex offenders, but it would doubtlessly work on normal "perverts" too--not to mention guys like me, who of course only watched this disgusting filth to see the lush St. Tropez scenery--and now it's ruined forever (Damn you, David Hamilton!)

Still photographer and occasional film director David Hamilton ventures into the homevideo realm with a Japanese-French production "A Summer in St. Tropez", a dreamy, impressionistic film of young girls' daily life at the famed resort. Sans narration and with minimal dialog or action, pic is an okay mood piece for fanciers of Hamilton's soft-focus photography. Aside from home tv use, it could play theatrically as a short subject if trimmed by about half.

Using back-lighting and diffused light photography (pic is visually reminiscent of Hamilton's "Bilitis" feature right down to the casting of numerous svelte young femmes), "St. Tropez" features surprisingly little nudity in its languorous visuals of young women at play. Episodic treatment is ultimately a bore as we observe the girls at mealtime, swimming at sunset, out picnicking and dancing, winding up with an authentic-looking wedding processional.

Absence of dialog is a plus, alleviating the need to dub or subtitle, but there's little to rivet one's attention. Hamilton's most stylish segment, a still photo-montage suddenly cutting to live action as the lead actress wakes up everyone in the "dorm" was done better originally by Chris Marker in his classic sci-fi short "La Jetee". Film is aided in sustaining its mood by Benoit Widemann's dreamy keyboard and strings musical score.

My review was written in September 1983 after watching the film on a Thorn-EMI videocassette.

There is no more beautiful sight on God's green earth, than a nubile young female and I make no excuses for enjoying looking at them. David Hamilton has had a terrific life photographing girls. I have seen his other work and a lot of it is to be admired, this film though, isn't very good.(At least my copy of the DVD.)It is dated 1984 but appears to be shot in the seventies, grainy and faded with bad sound. Bright sunlight is difficult to 'shoot' in but half the time I found it hard to see anything clearly. (Bilitis is also shot in sunlight yet is fine, all is sharp.)So be warned, if you wish to spend sixty minutes hoping to see sharp clear images of young girls disporting themselves on beaches, this film isn't it!

I'm not going to bother with introducing David Hamilton and explaining the controversial nature of his work, if you don't know about him a wikipedia search should . I do think some of his photography is rather good, and artful enough that it doesn't feel sleazy at all, and remember enjoying both "Tendres cousines" (which has found its way into modern pop culture due to being referenced several times by "Arrested Development") and "Premiers désirs" (starring a young Emmanuelle Beart), although I haven't seen either film in a while and don't remember them, except for the former being somewhat alarmingly close to justifying the accusations against Hamilton for being a 'child pornographer'. "Un été à Saint-Tropez" is inconceivably awful and laughable as a film, however. I'd rather sit through the somewhat lame yuk-yuk lines in "Tendres cousines" than this thing ever again. Awful use of slow-motion, including one five-minute long pillow-fight scene, no dialogue, no plot, this one truly does expose Hamilton as someone who gets off on seeing nude teenage girls and doesn't particularly care about anything else. Still, it's not all that creepy, as most of these girls appear to be between 16-18, maybe a little older even, and a couple of them really are gorgeous. As soft porn the movie will probably work for desperate ephebophiles, but it's too lunk-headed and awfully-made to work as a film, and Hamilton's soft-focus photography is occasionally nice to look at, but wasted on a pointless piece of crap.

...for three reasons. One is that the girls involved seem a year or so older than usual, with the result that their bodies are more curved, and the film seems less like "child porn". Second, he uses the south of France for good advantage in this one.

Finally, and most importantly, this is a dialog-less, almost plotless film. So one can gaze at the young, sun-lit European bodies without ever once being subjected to the howlingly awful lines that afflicted "Tendres Cousins" and "Bilitis" from opening titles to final credits.