Summer of 85

“Despite a plot that hinges on the death of a young gay man, Summer of 85 artfully avoids exploitation.”

Title: Summer of 85 (2020) / French: Été 85
Director: François Ozon 👨🏼🇫🇷🌈
Writers: Screenplay by François Ozon 👨🏼🇫🇷🌈 based on the novel by Aidan Chambers 👨🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 4/5

It’s not difficult to enjoy Summer of 85, an LGBTQ film that just screened at Toronto International Film Festival last weekend. In adapting Aidan Chambers’ 1982 novel titled Dance On My Grave, director François Ozon employs powerful devices of nostalgia and sun-hazy Normandy beaches to craft a world that beckons alluringly.

While Ozon has fully 18 other movies under his belt, parallels to 2017’s Call Me By Your Name or to the classic The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) still feel applicable. All three films feature preppy young men in love, sometimes with each other. But while Call Me By Your Name successfully demonstrates the ravages of time on youthful desires, and The Talented Mr. Ripley simmers with subtext in endlessly fascinating ways, Summer of 85 feels thin by comparison. Ironic, perhaps, considering its central focus on the most sobering topic of all: death.

From the onset, the 16-year-old protagonist Alexis Robin (Félix Lefebvre) narrates his story while alluding to tragedy, going so far as to introduce the confident, charming David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin) as “the future corpse.” But Alexis’ obsession with death—complete with a clandestine visit to a morgue—never quite takes root. David’s passing away supplies the framework to a tale of doomed summer romance, but never coalesces into anything more than that.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Men command this story both behind and in front of the camera, but supporting characters do include women like David’s mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) or Alexis’ friend Kate (Philippine Velge), an English au pair who recently moved to the coastal French town. In addition, Alexis’ timid mother appears in multiple scenes as an oblivious but comforting presence in his life.

Women see an okay amount of screen time and never feel like offensive caricatures, but they do exist solely to serve mens’ narratives. The most important of them, Kate, gets bounced around the story like a hacky sack who kicks the plot forward. She falls for David’s seduction and inadvertently becomes the wedge between him and a jealous Alexis. Later, she goes out of her way to do Alexis a huge favor, only to have him badly mishandle it and leave Kate in the lurch. Later still, she obliges to being a shoulder to cry on as Alexis continues to be a hot mess.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t decide if the character of David’s mother was intentionally unnerving or just poorly rendered. Viewers have no real impression of her besides an invasive personality, which we encounter when Mme Gorman’s first reaction to meeting Alexis is to draw him a hot bath and aggressively strip him out of his wet clothes against his will—upon which she stares at his crotch and awkwardly compliments him on his dick size. Beyond that uncomfortable introduction, and her grief after her son dies, we know nothing of the widowed Mme Gorman.

Race: 1.5/5

Given its timeframe and location, the whiteness of this town in Normandy feels both realistic yet unimaginative. We all know that people of color existed in the 1980s and it’s never a stretch to actually see them onscreen, even in minor roles. By endlessly staging stories in the past and pretending populations were uniformly white, we do modern cinema—and actors of color who are working in film today—a massive disservice.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00

Within minutes, we know we’re about to dig a grave for one of the film’s main characters—a premise that skirts dangerously close to cinema’s longstanding Bury Your Gays trope, in which queer characters get killed off for whatever reason. With such knowledge, the rest of the story unravels with a strong sense of foreboding, as you know this summer fling won’t end well.

But if a queer character dies, does that automatically mean the entire work perpetuates stereotypes? In this case I’d argue no, thanks in large part to the fact that the film has been adapted and directed by a gay filmmaker. Perhaps guided by Ozon’s empathy, David’s death never approaches anything close to trauma porn—one of the main reasons why the Bury Your Gays trope can feel so violating at times. And in a strange way, the centering of this tragedy as framework feels better than the gut-wrenching realization, in so many other cases, that a queer character is being killed for shock value or some other heightened emotion meant to be felt by straight characters. None of that sensationalization occurs here, especially as two other queer characters continue to live beyond David’s burial.

I will admit giving a tiny side-eye to the original idea that novelist Aidan Chambers, who is married to a woman, wrote about a story that focuses on the death of a gay character. But again, the fact of having a queer filmmaker behind the steering wheel of Summer of 85 makes all the difference.

Deduction for Religion: -0.25

David’s religious identity feels flattened as it only ever comes up within the context of his death. We first find out he’s Jewish when professor Lefèvre (Melvil Poupaud), who had mentored both Alexis and David, tells Alexis’ caseworker that “[the cause of David’s death] wasn’t anti-Semitic.” Later, Alexis looks up Jewish burial rites in the attempts to visit David’s grave in privacy.

These fleeting references to Judaism hardly offend. But a more well-rounded depiction should feel present throughout a character, in both good times and bad. Compare to Call Me By Your Name which quietly follows two main characters who are Jewish, played authentically in the case of Armie Hammer, and penned by novelist André Aciman who comes from a Sephardic Jewish family. The ensuing level of naturalism, such as Oliver’s ever-present Star of David necklace or Elio’s attraction toward someone who may understand his own cultural background, is simply missing from Summer of 85’s more superficial take.

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.25/5

If you enjoyed Call Me By Your Name, there’s a good chance you’ll find something to enjoy in Ozon’s Summer of 85. The latter doesn’t quite wield the same heft, and I personally couldn’t get away from the dismal centering of queer death. But Ozon artfully avoids any sense of exploitation in the story’s inherent subject matter, allowing for the film’s true strength of languid beauty and sand-worn heartache to shine.

Like Summer of 85? Try these other titles featuring seaside locales.

*The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)*

Grade: CLiSeptember 19, 2020Great for: LGBTQ