Ein Sommer an der See

I have seen this movie on the German TV yesterday with the title: "A summer at the sea" and I was deeply impressed.

Despite that it was produced in 1990, the theme is more up-to-date than ever. Excellent actors of all ages performed very well indeed, a great story, some romantic spots and lovely music will make you thinking about the relationship of children to their parents, their pain and childish emotions which often get hurt.

This story could happen today, next month or the following year, next door of you or at any other location or country. So you will get nothing NEW out of that movie but the sad reality of daily life in the eyes of children whose parents can't behave.

I only can highly recommend this movie - buy the DVD and you will enjoy it definitively more than just one time.

The only good part is the perspective of the kids. Diane Kurys.has an eye for cinematography, and mostly kids.

For the rest, she better directed some TV-series or alike. She knows the business, though this movie looks wooden, lacks depth. Rather on the shallow side, early evening before prime time.

This movie looks like being done by some good handy-man; and yet not really artistically.

The narration of a summer vacation of two children, whose mother has decided to leave her husband, and instead mingle with a much younger artist. This relationship lacks any visible chemistry, except that both seem to have been cast.

There's a bit of overdone comedy by the landlord. The to-be-left husband, though played pretty well, doesn't get to develop this role. When the little one leaps into his arms, it is plainly visible that she does because she was told to.

The good, and likewise sad, part is the display of the interacting among the children, their difficulties in coping with the situation, their personal development while the separation of the couple develops further, and becomes more and more obvious.

I just can't understand why anyone would be willing to have spent all the time, effort, and money it takes to make a film on something like this. It really takes a lot of effort to make a movie. More than a few people in this world felt passionately enough about this thing to write it, direct it, shoot it, rehearse it, finance it, etc, etc. My god! It's not that it's really bad or anything, there just doesn't seem to be any point in it existing. It's a boring movie about everyday people doing everyday crap. Sometimes they hang out at the beach. Sometimes they bicker. There's some kissing. Why? Why not just do nothing instead?

The French seem to have a talent for making a completely believable sense of time and place in films. And characters. A lot of French movies feel less like standard films than time capsules perfectly preserved. It is so easy to believe what you're seeing is real, or that what you're watching actually happened.

These movies, perhaps as a corollary, often leave much semblance of plot behind in the pursuit of realism, and that's fine. It makes a welcome change from plot-driven Hollywood films.

However, this can be an issue at times, such as when a movie needs a resolution. "C'est La Vie" is an example. The movie feels so real that a climax seems overtly stagey anyway, but here it's also surprisingly depressing. And it seems to come out of nowhere. The depressing ending isn't foreshadowed at all, so it's a slap in the face, and almost made me angry.

I enjoyed the movie for most of it, though. It's about two girls, twelve and eight, who go away for a holiday to the seaside in 1958. The older girl has a puppy-love romance develop with a boy, while cracks become more apparent in their parents' relationship.

The parents didn't evince much sympathy from me. I wish the focus had been on the kids more. Possibly, then, seeing the failure of their parents' relationship through their eyes, would have prepared us for the conclusion, making the ending sad and poignant rather than depressing and bewildering.

The is a very typically French slice of late Fifties middle-class life as seen during summer at the seaside when the parents' marriage is breaking up. The looks, the behavior, the attitudes could only be French. In that sense the film has a certain fascination and, hopefully, period accuracy (it's set in 1958).

The subtext is that for a young teenage girl in a sociable world, with a sister and brothers and a pleasant uncle and aunt and an annoying nanny and a young boy interested in kissing her and a close relationship with the imaginary addressee of her daily diary, her parents' disintegrating marriage is by no means the only thing going on in her world--especially given the fact that she's at a summer resort in a rented house and the mother is often away and the father is almost always away. There is a lot going on, most notably the changes in herself. This is probably the film's and Kurys' real subject--only it's a difficult one to put across and she doesn't quite succeed. Ultimtely too much is nonetheless going on, and it is all given too similar weight. Kurys, perhaps in her effort to balance autobiography with history and sociology, winds up making neither the adult nor the children's point of view strong enough. Lindon, Bruni-Tedeschi, Bacri, Berry, and Baye have been in better films. However, they're interesting actors, and the child actors are equally fine. This is not as bad or as great as some have suggested. It's very watchable, but it doesn't really go anywhere.Not a disaster, and a sincere effort, but not successful storytelling and not finally a very memorable experience.