Été 85

Such a pity this movie is released during corona. Été 85 deserves worldwide recognition and rewards like Call Me By Your Name. It is said director Francois Ozon was inspired by this movie to make his own version, set in 1985, when he turned 18 in France.

This movie is typically Ozon, he's a master in story telling, stirs up our emotions, appeals to our hormones. The cast is wonderful. The male lead (Alex) is a brooding 16 year old student, who goes down the rabbit hole in his passion for his flamboyant lover (David) an 18 year old unstable character who lost his father a year ago.

Almost from the start we know their love is doomed, but the story unfolds like a sweet gay summer romance. We watch the boys sailing, dancing, driving to the sea, watching the sunset, exchanging sloppy kisses, making out at every opportunity. All scenes are filmed in 16 mm tinted in light colors to remind us of the eighties.

The boys fling lasts only 6 weeks, but makes a life long impression on Alex with life lessons about seduction, passion, jealousy and death. Later on he asks himself questions about real love, and the ideal of love, two different things, like we all know, but difficult to discern when you're intensely in love for the very first time.

All in all I loved this sexy, nostalgic Gloom & Doom boys love that seems fitting for the eighties. Go watch it.

In the title summer, on a beach town, two teenage boys meet while sailing and fall in love. The story is told mostly by way of an essay that recounts the events of the summer, which allows for selective disclosures (or not). Right at the start of the film, we know something bad has happened, but it takes most of the movie to find out what and why.

The young actors are natural, and the cinematography is gorgeous. Being set in 1985, I suppose it can't end in "getting married and living happily ever after", but there is maturity and hope.

Summary

This film about a passionate youthful gay romance (un amor fou) once again shows us Ozon's ability to combine genres and his proverbial narrative fluidity and addresses one of his most frequent topics: the insurmountable distance mediated by the point of view between the story and the elusive reality and between the perception we have of others and their true nature.

Review

Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) is a 16-year-old boy who has recently lived with his family in a seaside resort on the Normandy coast. When he goes sailing with a sailboat, he meets David (Benjamin Voisin), a young man who lives with his mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) in the area. The meeting gives rise to a romance between the two.

As with many François Ozon films, talking about them implies much more than referring to his anecdote. But we can start there.

Right from its introduction, Summer of 85 shows us Alexis at a point after the romance, engaged in a situation that could lead to prosecution linked to David's death. This time will alternate with that of romance, which turns the film partially into a police enigma that as such sustains his interest.

But it is love fou that is the main object of the narration, which proceeds with Ozon's usual fluidity, with its fair doses of dialogues and images, and with a colorful summer palette of eighties texture, delivered to the beauty and charisma of the protagonists, with that ease of French cinema when it comes to showing bodies and desire.

But we said that Summer of 85 is much more than his anecdote about a passionate coming of age: it is an essay on the story itself and its relationship with reality. Because, as happened in Dans la maison and other films by the director, the point of view takes on fundamental relevance. And the point of view is that of Alexis, since the voiceover and what the film shows correspond to the story he makes of his romance; it is his version of the facts and his subjectivity that are brought into play and staged. It is love fou, with his passion, his idealizations, his pacts, his asymmetries, his projections, his ways of processing loss and mourning, his perverse elements, in the voice of Alexis; the loving object/subject as salvation and as condemnation. And this also determines what fatally remains off screen (and out of narrative control), plunging Alexis and the viewer into impotence and despair. There is in Alexis's story a component of nostalgia that the director places in the abyss with nostalgia about an entire era.

In this way, a frequent topic in Ozon's cinema is staged - the elusive nature of reality and its insurmountable distance from the story - and with French cinema in general: the literary (in this case Alexis's notes) as articulator of a cinematographic story. The subjectivity permeating the story, but also and fundamentally, the perception of the loved one.

There is something joyous and fresh about this film that reminds us of Call Me By Your Name and the We Are Who We Are series, both by Luca Guadagnino (even Voisin seems like a more protean version of Chalamet) and also Chabrolian in the way he articulates the drama with the thriller.

I decided to watch the movie with mixed feelings. The plot seemed not intriguing enough, but Ozon's name is (or at least was) a certain guarantee. Alas, the disappointment prevailed. In 8 femmes, Ozon managed to keep an unforgiving and at the same time uncommenting eye into the human behavior. The behavior itself developed the characters, and brought them together into a whole. Eté 85 is a mixture of Ozon and a try to mimic Almadóvar's way of looking into tragedy, which unfortunately fails completely. The scenes are great, the actors true to their characters, but what comes out is a story swaying between a kitsch gay teenagers' love affair and a family drama. The ending is weird (I am referring to the court sentence), taking into account the fact that the subject of homosexuality was at the time socially unacceptable was extremely poorly part of the story to that point, with the exception of a vague reference to an uncle). None of the three main characters (Alexis, David and the mother, Mme Gorman) develop and their reactions throughout the film are irrational, somewhere between funny and stupid, in a combination which simply does not work. Kate's acting is miserable, same as Alexis' parents. The only convincing character, if any, is probably the social worker.

Concluding, this is a mediocre film to watch if you are into gay dramas and have nothing better to do. Matches up the standards of east asian gay drama series, but not the ones of main stream cinematography, and is definitely not Ozon's most brilliant accomplishment.

Thanks to Ozon for making something that leaves typical McHollywood LA tropes in the dirt. Most gay films pals in comparison. Why? A story, well written story, dedicate visionaries, and actors. This is what cereative cinema is all about. Sure, we've seen the summer romances, and this film certainly does not do anything new in that respect - however that is the point, The skill to present this as an acceptable love affair, with a good twist, is why it's stronger than most. Summer of 85 brings in everything but the kitchen sink from literate queerdom: young romance, Verlaine, Rimbaud, eager French-isms in tragedy, and steamy sensuality. But it's also what Ozon left out: tired politics, rah-rah Pink parade tropes, and endless rants on victimhood. These are boys, who fell in love, and there's a reasonably believable story about them - apparently rooted in a real life saga of a similar situation, found in British newspapers decades ago. My only criticism is, the film could have used a deeper delve into New Romanticism of the 80s - if you're going to do The Cure - go deeper. Rimbaud was a very bad boy, Alex is not 'bad' he's consumed with passion. Slightly more stylized and slightly less topical. That said, this movie is a great watch, I'll see it in cinema post-covid, and highly recommend. Thank God someone is making things like this! "Never run with the masses, there's danger in numbers" - Quentin Crisp