Été 85
François Ozon (2020)
Twenty-three colours blue? Maybe even fifty shades of it. In François Ozon’s new film, set in Dieppe, the combinations of azure sky, sea, clothes and eyes are beautifully differentiated. Hichame Alaouié’s pellucid cinematography gives you the blues and the effect is elating. The same can’t quite be said for the picture as a whole, which tells the story of death-obsessed sixteen-year-old Alexis Robin (Félix Lefebvre), his brief affair with David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin) and the aftermath to David’s fatal road accident. But Summer of 85 is far from heavy going, thanks to the fluent superficiality of the man who made it. After the strikingly, often impressively, different By the Grace of God (2019), this film sees normal Ozon service resumed.
Because normal in the Ozon oeuvre means sexually and psychologically unorthodox, the central love affair and what might be termed Alexis’s post-mortem behaviour feel familiar and unchallenging. The source of Ozon’s screenplay must have been a different matter when first published, in 1982: British author Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave is described on Wikipedia as ‘one of the first few [sic] young adult books published by a major publisher that depicts homosexuality without being judgmental’. In contrast, the film’s amalgam of school-summer-holidays romance, visual allure and a soundtrack of pop hits of the mid-70s and early 80s, gives it a nostalgic feel. Ozon was himself still a teenager in 1985.
The lack of surprise in Summer of 85 is compounded by its narrative structure. Alexis’s voiceover explains at the outset his deathly preoccupations and introduces David as ‘the future corpse’. Ozon then switches back and forth between the protagonist’s recollections of the summer, culminating in his reactions to David’s death, and the present, in which a counsellor (Aurore Broutin) interviews Alexis ahead of a judicial hearing. Has he been accused of his lover’s homicide? It seems possible until the circumstances of David’s demise become clear and the claims of his grief-stricken mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) that Alexis is responsible for her son’s death are explained. It’s immediately after a major falling out with Alexis that David motorcycles to his death but Alexis wasn’t directly involved. He’s been charged with a lesser offence, committed by way of keeping a promise to David.
They first meet when the borrowed boat that Alexis has taken out to sea off the Normandy coast capsizes and David rescues him. Over the course of the next few weeks, the two boys become companions then lovers. Alexis has been in two minds about whether or not to leave school. His literature teacher, M Lefèvre (Melvil Poupaud), thinks he’s a promising student and encourages Alexis to stay on. His dockworker father (Laurent Fernandez) wants his son to get a job; his housewife mother (Isabelle Nanty) wants Alexis ‘to be happy’. David, a couple of years older, has left school, and helps his widowed mother run her chandler’s shop. Alexis starts working there in order that he and David see even more of each other. At the height of their affair, they make a pact, proposed by David. Whichever of them dies first, the survivor will dance on his grave.
This element presumably derives from Aidan Chambers’s novel but the way it’s handled in Summer of 85 is highly characteristic of Ozon. The particular nature of the boys’ pact, given his pre-existing obsession with death, should mean more to Alexis than it does. It’s merely absorbed into the film’s kinky-macabre surface, which covers plenty of ground. Bathing at the Gorman home after the sea rescue, Alexis, in voiceover, recalls that the bath seemed to him like a coffin, the bathroom like a pharaoh’s funerary chamber. Determined to say an intimate final farewell to David, he turns up at the morgue in drag, pretending to be the deceased’s devoted girlfriend. The morgue supervisor (Bruno Lochet) is persuaded to let him see David’s body: Alexis gets up close and personal with it. These sound like very different illustrations of morbid infatuation – a trivial thought and a melodramatic deed respectively. As such, they might seem to correspond to what Alexis says introducing the story, that the brutal reality of David’s end transformed his feelings about death. In Ozon’s hands, however, the bathroom musing and the morgue histrionics share a humorous weightlessness. There’s an upside to this lack of earnestness. After David’s death, Alexis flirts with the idea of suicide. A montage of what he gets up to with tablets, razor blades, and so on, doesn’t make you flinch. The exquisitely listless attempts to end his life make the montage almost funny. Yet the longer the film goes on, the more you suspect death is a cinematically diverting subject for Ozon as much as a hang-up for Alexis.
Benjamin Voisin’s interpretation of David is another aspect of Summer of 85 where lack of depth pays dividends. It’s quickly evident that Alexis is no more than a passing fancy for David, who makes the running but will soon move on to a different partner. As you watch the relationship run its course, Voisin’s photogenic David seems excessively lacking in human texture. In retrospect, this works very well. It’s suggested to Alexis, late in the story, that he fell in love with David not as a person but as an idea – a dream lover. It’s a plausible explanation that makes sense of the impression given by Benjamin Voisin: recalling David, the viewer can now see him through Alexis’s idealising eyes. The dream lover theory is advanced by Kate (Philippine Velge), an English au pair whom Alexis and David meet one day on the beach. Speaking in conscientious schoolgirl French (including the subjunctive), Philippine Velge is vivid and likeable: Kate is also a pleasingly lightweight feature of the film, even though she causes the rift between the boys, as David turns his attention to her and Alexis gets jealous. There’s a rapprochement after David’s death, when Alexis confides in Kate. She thinks up the cross-dressing plan, lends Alexis the wherewithal for it from her own wardrobe, and goes along with him to the morgue.
Ozon’s shallowness grates in a detail like the Gormans’ Jewishness, which seems to be included mainly for the sake of giving his family’s mourning of David a more distinctive look. Also jarring is a moment that may be intended as wryly comical but which has disturbing weight. When David brings Alexis home after the boating mishap, Mme Gorman insists not only that the young guest have a hot bath but that she undress him for it. His embarrassment seems meant to contrast amusingly with her brisk obliviousness to what she’s doing. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s strong presence turns Mme Gorman’s keen-eyed approval of Alexis’s naked body into a queasy abuse of authority.
In due course, Bruni-Tedeschi also overdoes things as the bereaved mother. She stands out like a sore thumb in a film that is otherwise well cast. Félix Lefebvre, nineteen when Summer of 85 was shot, makes a fine job of holding it together. He’s fresh-faced and quite short, so that Alexis seems poised between childhood and adulthood. Yet he’s never innocent (except, it seems, of David’s motives). Lefebvre gives Alexis a wilful determination and his face ages remarkably between the immediate past and present, which helps to justify the film’s structure. With an abundant curly wig and thick-framed spectacles, Melvil Poupaud is almost unrecognisable as M Lefèvre but gives a nicely suggestive performance. (In response to a question from Alexis, the teacher eventually admits that David once seduced him, too.) Alexis’s parents, well played by Isabelle Nanty and Laurent Fernandez, are seldom seen together; when they talk to Alexis, each is in the habit of deferring to the other. This seems to apply only to Mme Robin, nervous of what her husband will think of their less than macho son, until an almost touching exchange between Alexis and his father. M Robin, under the mistaken impression that Kate is a girlfriend in the traditional sense, is cheered by this but says it’s for his wife to decide if Alexis can invite Kate to the Robins’ home.
After getting into a fight with other boys at a fairground, Alexis and David make their escape on the latter’s motor bike. When they get back to his house, they clean up each other’s cuts and bruises then sit together in silence. Ozon holds the camera on the boys and on their reflections in the mirror behind them. The figures in the foreground seem to be motionless; the figures in the mirror are moving gradually closer to each other. This ingenious shot was for me a reminder of why I’ve come to look forward to each new Ozon film (having disliked the first ones I saw, especially Potiche). His work may not be deep but it’s highly and reliably entertaining. The sheer facility of his film-making makes it a pleasure to watch – even if facileness is the other side of the same coin. When Alexis gets into the cemetery under cover of darkness to dance on David’s grave, he attracts the attention of two police officers by playing as accompaniment a cassette of the theme song of his summer of love. A pity this is Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ rather than Bananarama’s ‘Cruel Summer’, which is also on the film’s playlist, and Alexis’s dancing is pretty hopeless. It still makes for a beguiling climax to Summer of 85 that encapsulates François Ozon’s peculiar talent. He fuses genuine feeling and posing, the frivolous with the grave.
29 October 2020
