Summer of 85, review: how first love can feel like a matter of life-and-death
Dir: François Ozon. Cast: Félix Lefebvre, Benjamin Voisin, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Philippine Velge, Melvil Poupaud, Isabelle Nanty, Laurent Fernandez. 15 cert, 101 mins
The French director François Ozon can turn his hand to any genre going, but the result is always stippled with his distinctive fingerprints. His 19th feature, which opens in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema tomorrow, is an enthralling coming-of-age melodrama set in the Calais of 35 years ago – yet it’s clearly the product of the same playful gaze and frisky intellect as his dreamy erotic thriller Swimming Pool, his wily romantic wartime mystery Frantz, and his larksome retro comedy Potiche.
Freely adapted from the 1982 novel Dance on My Grave by the British writer Aidan Chambers, Summer of 85 is a sweet gay romance that gradually morphs into something more suspenseful and macabre – with a note of cross-dressing farce, perhaps borrowed from his 1996 short A Summer Dress, which wittily undercuts all the teenage ardour and earnestness that comes with the turf.
The talented newcomer Félix Lefebvre stars as Alex, a 16-year-old boy who begins the film in police custody for what appears to be a very serious crime. In a voiceover that initially sounds like a cold-hearted confession, he recalls the summer he met his close friend and, ominously, “future corpse” David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin) – whom we meet as he comes scudding to the rescue when Alex’s small boat capsizes on a solo sailing excursion in the Dover Strait.
A kind of buff, Gallic, 18-year-old version of Rik Mayall with a permanently insinuating grin, David pulls Alex to safety, and the two soon strike up an amicable chemistry – which, after they go home to meet David’s coquettish mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), starts to acquire a more overtly sensual charge. She insists on a hot bath for their shivering guest, and even takes the liberty of undressing him herself – a scene that sends a dual frisson of embarrassment and eroticism coursing through the film which all but screams “formative experience”.
It also transpires that David’s father died just over a year ago, and his mother is counting on this new connection to bring some much-needed stability to her son’s unsettled life. To an extent, it does: the pair see Footloose at the local cinema together, and take sunset rides on David’s motorcycle, Alex clutching his friend’s waist as he daringly weaves through the oncoming cars. But even as their relationship takes a more intimate turn, such flirtations with danger suggest to Alex that there is a darker side to David, of which he has yet to become fully apprised. Even the ever-present switchblade comb he uses to tame his caramel locks unsheathes itself with the steely ching of a flick-knife.
For most of its opening half, Summer of 85 operates in a wistful, even sentimental mode. The Cure and Rod Stewart loom large on the soundtrack, while the colour palette is mostly alluring pastel shades of faded beach huts and stone-washed denim. (The exception is Alex’s own determinedly sexless family home, which is decorated in 50 shades of mushroom.)
Yet while the mood is nostalgic, the tint of rose is expertly counterbalanced with the growing whiff of trouble – thanks both to Alex’s melancholic narration and the occasional flashes forward to the preparations for some kind of criminal trial. The mid-film introduction of a third wheel, meanwhile – Philippine Velge’s note-perfect English au pair, Kate – creates a three-way dynamic that gently evokes Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and you find yourself gulping when they impulsively decide to embark on a boat trip à trois.
Yet Ozon is an adept overturner of expectations, and the jeopardy here isn’t of the thriller variety in any conventional sense. Rather, it springs from the thought that since first love so often feels like a life-or-death matter, perhaps a twist of fate could really turn it into one. The decision, in this light, to locate the story in 1985 in particular seems crucial: this was arguably the last innocent moment before the HIV crisis became unignorable, and young men like Alexis would have to confront some tough truths.
Summer of 85 might find Ozon at his briskest and breeziest, but as a specifically gay loss-of-innocence parable, it shoulders an unspoken weight.
In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday
