The movie that is now Summer of 85 has been kicking around in some form or another in French filmmaker François Ozon’s head since at least, well, the summer of 1985. That season, that year, an 18-year-old Ozon read Dance on My Grave (1982), an Aidan Chambers novel about a short-lived (and doomed) romance between a couple of teenage boys.
The book impacted the openly gay Ozon so much that after several years making short films in his 20s, he figured a screen version of Dance on My Grave would one day be his debut feature. But as history has shown, that didn’t pan out — the honor instead went to the well-received Sitcom (1998) — and Ozon set notions of adaptation aside. He trucked on with a career that has proven both impressively prolific and, to a sometimes-maddening degree, courageously averse to a personal comfort zone or consistent quality.
Ozon at long last decided to honor his younger self’s wishes after rereading Dance on My Grave in 2018, after finishing up the shoot for By the Grace of God (2019). The experience both surprised him (he discovered he unconsciously cribbed numerous motifs from the formative novel throughout his career) and suddenly sparked a need to see this long-beloved work up on screen, purely as a moviegoer. As it goes for many filmmakers, sometimes a big impetus for making a movie comes from getting tired of not seeing what you want to see get made, followed by the realization that you don’t have to keep waiting if you have enough leverage to take matters into your own hands.
The long-put-off Summer of 85 has predictably engendered limiting but also understandable comparisons to Luca Guadagnino’s lush Call Me By Your Name (2017). (I admittedly filed Ozon’s movie in my brain as something of a Normandy-set answer to Call Me after watching the trailer for the first time what feels like forever ago.) Jettison the details of Summer of 85’s narrative arc and the superficial resemblances are there. Both are sumptuously shot films about a pair of improbably beautiful young men who have a short-lived love affair in a gorgeously sun-dappled locale in the ‘80s. But while Call Me By Your Name is distinctive for its bittersweet lusciousness, and the way it powerfully evoked the headspace of someone young and overwhelmed by so-far-untapped passion, Summer of 85 leaves behind a trail of darkness, and is also conspicuously told from the perspective of someone older and more cynical. And it spends about as much time in the gloomy aftermath of its brief, driving romance as it does the romance. It doesn’t begin and end inside the tunnel of love the affair forms.
Summer of 85 is also not quite as good of a movie. The romance is more skimmed-through than we’d like; the fallout leans too heavily toward a kind of melodrama that inhibits designed-to-be-powerful emotional climaxes from soaring. Its narrative structure impedes dramatic momentum almost immediately. But like the fling propelling it, it has its powerful moments, usually found in the flashing indications of simultaneously invigorating and nerve-wracking self-discovery.
That everything to come in Summer of 85 is foredoomed is made clear from the outset. When we initially meet our 16-year-old hero, Alexis (Félix Lefebvre, like River Phoenix but beachier and not as good at portraying inner turmoil), he’s deathly pale, has puffy bags under his eyes, is (in voiceover) talking at length about a long-standing obsession with mortality, and appears to be implicated in a death. The death, specifically, of David (Benjamin Voisin), an 18-year-old that, we soon learn, he had an affair with over the summer. Ozon, who also wrote Summer of 85, is cagey about whether David’s demise was an accident or if Alexis is an inchoate murderer. The film relies heavily on pastel-colored flashbacks (we get a splendidly Technicolor iteration of the ‘80s); they commence with a quirky meet-cute-on-the-sea that evolves into a quickly-close friendship, then a six-week romance that Alexis ranks among the happiest days of his life. They also rank among the most possessed. “When I was with him, it wasn’t enough, either,” Alexis says at one point of David.
Ozon tends to skimp on the emotional detail that would make those happy, all-consuming days feel fully dramatically realized, though. And the period after David’s death leans toward overbroad soapiness. The movie feels most forced at its most markedly emotional. We don’t know very much of David and Alexis’ inner lives outside the circumstances which inform them. Ozon seems less interested in who they are and more what they symbolize in the story. David’s dad recently died, and his mom, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, is worried about his well-being to the point of helicoptering. Alexis lives in a male-dominated household that belittles creativity. That’s about as much as we get. (Alexis’ main additional character details are that he is a budding writer unhealthily preoccupied with death because he’s fascinated with Egyptology; both facts come across more like devices designed to support the narrative’s flashback-heavy framing than genuine extensions of his person.)
The romance itself is mostly dramatized through montage, with longer scenes over-reliant on platitude. One could argue that this is just right, emphasizing sweeping sensations and focusing on the specific only when something major is happening. As made clear through a piece of exposition delivered by a supporting character later in the movie, we’re seeing this relationship as Alexis is telling it (his voiceover guides the film), and so much of the drama is the result of romanticized memory and garden-variety idealization. But as a viewer you’re still left wanting more. You want to get swept up in the romance more than you actually do.
But Lefebvre and particularly Voisin are such refreshing, open-faced actors that they’re riveting to watch even when the script doesn’t thoroughly dimensionalize the young men they’re playing. And theirs is a believable chemistry. They feel natural together, and in the scenes before they’ve made obvious their mutual attraction you can almost see the nerves around who’s going to make the first move — and if it’s safe to. These young actors also do an especially good job conveying the unspoken tension underneath the relationship, particularly how the younger Alexis becomes intoxicated by the elder David’s comparative boldness and a comforting perceived sense of experience. It’s like he’s being guided, in a way. They’re not looking at each other equally; there is some idolization going on that will eventually prove destructive.
The second stretch of the movie — really, the period just after David has died — isn’t as engaging as the nonetheless imperfect first one. I generally think Summer of 85 would be better if it were told linearly. Explicitly knowing something is badly fated from the get makes it much harder — and this is true of any movie — to get emotionally absorbed without a congruous amount of emotional exactitude to make the structural choice come off as absolutely necessary. But the latter part of Summer of 85 can still be worthily perceptive, and nicely understated, in the smaller moments where you can tell that Alexis, now back down to Earth after dancing carefreely in the clouds of romantic euphoria, is dealing with newfound anxieties in addition to his grief.
You sense his gnawing unease around whether his family is going to accept his now-confirmed-to-him gayness and (with less of a focus) his increased certainty that he would prefer to pursue a creative career instead of the blue-collar one his father envisions for him. The problem with seeing yourself clearer is that while it might provide some relief understanding yourself better, those around you may not have that same appreciation. Summer of 85 makes no grand announcements, doesn’t come up with neat resolutions. One of the better things about this in many ways defective movie is that it recognizes, and intelligently shows, that few things in life are as straightforward as we might wish them to be. For Alexis, the romance’s significance will only keep expanding with time.
HEARTWARMING FAMILY DRAMA CODA goes exactly where you think it will, but you don’t care. It’s the type of formulaic movie that reminds you why certain formulae keep getting reused and remixed: there’s a perennial hope one will again work as effectively as it does in a movie like CODA.
You’ll recognize the movie’s central conceit when it’s sanded down to its barest elements. It’s about a teenager from an ultra-tight-knit family who can’t decide if they’d like to stay home post-graduation, like their family would like, or leave the nest to pursue dreams that have never been taken very seriously. (I was reminded regularly of 1988’s wonderful Running on Empty, although CODA thankfully isn’t so emotionally taxing: you’re grinning much more often than you’re on the brink of tears.) But CODA’s precise premise is more novel — largely unprecedented, really — and writer-director Sian Heder, remaking the popular 2014 French movie La Famille Bélier, finds intimate-feeling emotional specificity within a broadly overfamiliar story structure.
CODA revolves around a high-school senior, Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), who is the only hearing member in a Deaf family that owns a fishing business in Cape Ann. (CODA is an acronym for Child of Deaf Adults.) Her parents, Frank and Jackie (Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin), and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) use her as an interpreter and their ears at sea. It’s implicitly understood that after she graduates, Ruby will continue working for them. It would be expensive to hire a replacement; finding an ASL-fluent candidate would also be difficult. Ruby feels obligated; she hasn’t thought much about if she wants a future different from what feels like her preordained one.
We enter Ruby’s life just as doubt begins to mist over it. All her life, she’s been passionate about music and singing; the movie tellingly opens with her merrily belting along to Etta James on the family fishing boat, her dad and brother unbothered. After impulsively signing up for choir on the first day of school, she discovers that her passion is equal to an innate talent. Ruby is an emotive singer with a honeyed voice — you can tell how natural music is to her. Outside validation unlocks a major step forward (and also throws Ruby off balance), not least because no one has ever reassured her that she sounds as good as she thinks she might, but also because music has long been something that is distinctly hers, untethered from duty. It’s always uncomfortable to make the intensely personal public.
Ruby’s choir teacher, Mr. V. (Eugenio Derbez), sees something in her. He nudges her to not only continue exploring what seems like budding artistry, but consider attending the Berklee College of Music, where he has connections. (Soon, Ruby’s taking private lessons from him; she’s often reprimanded for running late because of family-business duties.) Ruby’s piling-on life changes also usher in her first relationship, with an introverted classmate (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) who you know will become something more the moment he professes a shared love of the Shaggs, a band Ruby has always thought she was alone in liking.
CODA hits a couple of false notes. Derbez’s performance as the über-animated and inspiring teacher is sometimes pitched a little too high; the Rossis’ spontaneously started fishing co-op ascends with fantasy-like fruitfulness. But other than these minor misjudgments, CODA is remarkably, and consistently, moving, almost entirely devoid of the forced emotionalism often entangled in less-well-told stories about choosing one’s dreams over perceived responsibility. (This is also a regularly very funny movie; Kotsur in particular scores the biggest laughs as a patriarch who is a dependable purveyor of gross-out TMI.)
CODA’s effectiveness of course has a lot to do with its great ensemble — it takes almost no convincing to get us to think these actors are really related — but also Heders’ deft handling of pivotal moments that could, in less assured hands, come off overly sentimental or on the nose. In one staging, Heder momentarily shoots a choir concert from the Rossis’ perspective, where the only way to comprehend Ruby’s talent is to take in sights of hearing audience members happily nodding along and in some cases tearing up. It’s an evocative show of empathy geared toward hearing viewers that astutely captures how interlinked pride in Ruby is with a certain amount of alienation. Other moments conspicuously designed to yank on our heartstrings — like when Ruby sings to her father one-on-one and he rests his hands on her neck to essentially “feel” her gift, or her climactic Berklee audition, where she signs lyrics to her family (who has sneaked into the auditorium to watch) while giving the words of the song she tries out with new emotional life to the panel of judges — work exactly like they’re supposed to. A sea of sniffles washed over the theater where I saw the movie (I contributed a few of my own); a woman who walked out of the theater behind me was still crying as she walked to her car.
You understand quickly why CODA was such a favorite at Sundance earlier this year: it’s the all-too-infrequent crowdpleaser you feel winning you over in real time. When a predictable development in the plot arrives, you’re not merely happy to see it happening — you notice you want the predictable thing to come true. CODA does what most movies of its tear-jerking cohort usually can’t: make you temporarily forget how to be cynical.
SIMON BARRETT HAS BEEN INVOLVED in some of the more distinctive horror movies of the last decade. With regular collaborator Adam Wingard turning his words to music through stylish direction, Barrett wrote the screenplays for the inventive, high-octane home-invasion thriller You’re Next (2013) and the lastingly fresh action mystery The Guest (2014).
These early efforts have remained memorable enough to make me see Barrett’s name attached to Séance, released earlier this year on demand, and automatically assume it was very likely to be not only good, but generally a cut above most modern-day genre offerings. (Séance is Barrett’s directorial debut.)
The movie is entertaining, almost soothing, in the way old-school trope-reinforcing slasher movies can be: ones you’re amused by because of how faithfully they prop up cliché. Séance is set at a cloistered all-girls school and involves a murder spree maybe enacted by a spirit recently conjured by a séance or an actual killer; it might put you pleasantly in mind of movies like The House on Sorority Row (1982) or Sorority House Massacre (1986), only in a more buttoned-up setting. Someone unfamiliar with Barrett’s previous work likely won’t assume, watching Séance, that he was behind some of the better horror films of the 2010s. This is to also say that those who are familiar with it will likely view this movie, a slasher (with some giallo flourishes) as visually stagnant as its unimaginative title, as a great disappointment. It’s an exclusively playing-it-safe effort from a writer who had at one time showed great glee renavigating well-traveled horror paths, finding exciting routes of his own. Séance is diverting enough, but sometimes thoughts of what exactly happened to Barrett (who is simply not the director Wingard is) torment the familiar fun.
Peterson Reviews 