THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Summer movies often have this little thing in common, commonly called the “coming of age”. For these last laps in the landscape of childhood, we have in mind the beaches and clear skies of Jacques Rozier, Eric Rohmer, Abdellatif Kechiche, Catherine Breillat… At the end, there are heartbreaks, first and last times, departures to war, to the office, to life for real.
It’s understood, the season is inspiring. On this theme, Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï manages to describe a new feeling, summer deprivation. His second feature film, It’s raining in the housepresented at Critics’ Week, at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 2023, offers a form of fair-weather asceticism, through the portrait of two adolescents.
It’s the summer holidays at Lake Eau-d’Heure, in Wallonia, the largest artificial body of water in Belgium. Living in the region year-round, Purdey, 17, with turquoise nails like his eyes, and his brother, Makenzy, 15, almost muscular, are left to their own devices and try to get by. Alcoholic mother. House in bad condition. Velux which is taking on water. Little money. And cigarettes, to pass the time. This can’t last much longer. Between the carefree nature of their age and the harshness of their daily lives, despite arguments and divergent interests, they support each other as best they can.
Progressing in stages, the film is like a series of postcards with false airs of happiness which hide a less perfect reality. On the front, the flamingo buoy, the white sand, the Californian sun, on the back, the cigarette holes, the dilapidated hut and the absent mother. Purdey cleans in order to rent an apartment, Makenzy sells drugs.
Family puzzle
Assuming this aesthetic of standing still from which so many summer feature films originate, Paloma Sermon-Daï’s chronicle unfolds through days that follow one another, where yesterday looks like tomorrow. As time passes, we think a lot about Their children after them, by the novelist Nicolas Mathieu (Actes Sud, 2018, Prix Goncourt). The setting, above all: it was a lake in a lost valley in Lorraine. But, among the teenagers in the film, the consciousness of tomorrow is never quite invaded by summer torpor or by the sound of pinball machines.
The authenticity of the fraternal bond owes a lot to the documentary work of the filmmaker. Purdey is the daughter of the latter’s half-brother, and Makenzy is Purdey’s half-brother. Her “little pot”, she says. This feature film, with its restless melancholy, turns out to be the second piece of a family puzzle begun with the documentary Little Saturday (2020, released in 2023), located in a Walloon village, on the banks of the Meuse, which described the close relationship between the mother, Ysma, and the director’s brother, Damien, a 43-year-old boy, a drug addict who had decided to make it out. Every moment spent together seemed like a reunion scene where we said the essential things to each other, as if everything was going to end soon.
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