THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
A summer like this is a film of its time. But it would also refer to a way of filming sexuality that seems to have been relegated to a now distant cinematic past, at a time when it was tackled head-on and not systematically considered infernal. It is a film of its time because it describes, in fact, a particular relationship to sex, this way that contemporary society expresses of sometimes considering it as ” problem “.
The film is a sort of chronicle of a summer. Everything will take place over twenty-six days, the period spent by three young women in an isolated house in the countryside, in the company of Octavia, a German university student and Sami, a social worker. Confronted with a compulsive, masochistic and sometimes aggressive sexual life, Geisha, Léonie and Eugénie are both subject to it in the eyes of their companions and the subjects of something that is difficult to define: the quest for a cure? Looking for personal appeasement? Deep awareness? And what exactly?
Time passes in various games, in harmless activities, in more or less formal conversations, in confessions sometimes, often in attempts at seduction. The links are tied according to a sometimes unexpected logic. Denis Côté attaches himself to characters captured in the slightest tremor of their daily and familiar being. Handheld camera, very close-ups of faces are a way for the Quebec filmmaker to seek an unobtainable truth. Because, gradually, the attention paid to all the protagonists installs a stubborn doubt about their true nature and surreptitiously reverses the roles. Thus the characters in a position of mastery gradually appear as just as tormented, even miserable, as the three young women, their objects of study. And these arrive episodically and furtively at a form of sovereignty which would deny the hypothesis of a malaise to be treated.
Symptoms
A summer like this is therefore a film without hysteria, without real drama, determined to seize time like a wave devoid of the logic and upheavals of a spectacular fiction. There will be no “secret behind the door” to discover, no explosive revelation, truth finally revealed by a journey, that taken by the three girls, which would solve the enigma once and for all. No disease reducible and soluble by what is not even a therapy. The film questions the idea of normality when it is attached to sexuality and opens, in fact, on a way of questioning, and above all of questioning, a very particular relationship to it, a relationship that has become the center of strictly contemporary preoccupations and which would like to make of them the symptoms of an intimate dysfunction.
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