When 16-year-old Alexis capsizes off the coast of Normandy, 18-year-old David heroically saves him. Alexis has just met the friend of his dreams, who opens his eyes to a new horizon of frien... Read allWhen 16-year-old Alexis capsizes off the coast of Normandy, 18-year-old David heroically saves him. Alexis has just met the friend of his dreams, who opens his eyes to a new horizon of friendship, art and sexual bliss.When 16-year-old Alexis capsizes off the coast of Normandy, 18-year-old David heroically saves him. Alexis has just met the friend of his dreams, who opens his eyes to a new horizon of friendship, art and sexual bliss.
- Awards
- 6 wins & 27 nominations
- Madame Gorman
- (as Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi)
- Chris
- (as Antoine Simony)
- Frère Gorman
- (as Samuel Brafman)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe movie was initially supposed to be called 'Été 84' ('Summer of 84'). Robert Smith, the singer of The Cure, refused to grant François Ozon the permission to use his song The Cure: In Between Days (1985) because it was actually released a year later, in 1985. Ozon wrote back a letter to Robert Smith asking for a lower price for the rights and saying that he could change the name of his movie to 'Été 85', which was finally done.
- Quotes
[Alexis describing his love]
Alexis: Maybe I loved him. I believed I did. I loved him as much as I understood the meaning of the word.
Alexis: How do you ever know? I always thought I'd know the minute it happened.
Alexis: But all I knew was I couldn't get enough of him. I wanted to spend every second of my time with him.
Alexis: But when I was with him, that wasn't enough either. I wanted to look at him, touch him, feel his touch.
Alexis: I wanted us to be together all the time, for 3,628,800 seconds.
- ConnectionsReferences Rope (1948)
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.
- danybur
- Apr 3, 2022
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Details
- Release date
- Countries of origin
- Official sites
- Languages
- Also known as
- Літо'85
- Filming locations
- Le Tréport, Seine-Maritime, France(exteriors, in particular the beach and the cemetery)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $71,788
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $9,390
- Jun 20, 2021
- Gross worldwide
- $3,610,818
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