Another film from the phantom edition of the Cannes Festival 2020 sees the darkness of the room in the space of the Rome Film Festival, Summer 85 (Summer 85) the new film directed by the enfant terrible of the French film scene François Ozon, escaped over and over again - in thirty years of career - from a definitive critical and artistic classification. An example is the case of the French critic René Prédal who, after having inventoried the Ozonian cinema of the 2000s in the section violent transgressions and radical attacks against the family as an institution, in his study of French cinema after XNUMX finds himself in the difficult task of relocating production of the director. If the first problem concerns the positioning of Ozon as an artist (his is auteur cinema or new French quality?), The next one is much more thorny: to account for the changing nature of his cinema. In short, is there a common element that is typically “Ozonian”?
Certainly, some common themes seem to persist in his filmography: in addition to the critique of the bourgeois family, Ozon seems to prefer the identity crisis, mourning, a certain evocative relationship to Fassbinder's cinema and the themes of transformation and metamorphosis. And here perhaps we find an answer (even if not entirely satisfactory) to the question about Ozonian poetics, a concept of "fluidity" that according to Thibaut Schilt would constitute the core of Ozon's cinema, the need to continually change skin, where < >.
A new future?
Based on the young adults novel Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers, this new film tells the summer of Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), a XNUMX-year-old with a fascination for death and a talent for writing, who has just moved with his family to the coastal town of Treport, in Normandy. Desperate for a friend and in the midst of a crisis regarding his future, the boy is saved during a boat accident by David (Benjamin Voisin), an eighteen-year-old young man who lives alone with his frail mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) after his father's untimely death.
Alexis, struck by the boy for his beauty, his charisma and his relentless joie de vivre, thinks he has finally found the friend he has always dreamed of and the two immediately make friends. But soon this relationship turns into something more, far from any kind of definition, halfway between loving passion and brotherly affection. A dream come true, but is that dream destined to survive until the end of the summer?
Eté 85 is a film that escapes the classifications of genre and style: at times it refers to the Billy Wilder-style crime drama, here and there it mentions the French nouvelle vague by Truffault, at times it recalls the new erotic cinema of Kechiche and the list goes on. We have ascertained that Ozon loves to escape from pigeonholing, but we still identify the theme of transformation typical of his cinema in the fluid and elusive nature of a relationship between two very young boys: first an explosive friendship, then a burning passion, which quickly becomes contempt which follows a tragic end. A relationship that nevertheless does not stop changing through Alexis: from pain and guilt, to lack and anger, which then finally becomes fulfillment and hope.
A coming-of-age and self-discovery novel in 80s tints, Eté 85 quickly runs out of ideas that are already quite confused, only to end up stuck in a motionless limbo just halfway through the film. The theme of change, of uncertainty, of the unstoppable fluidity of youthful feelings needed a decidedly more mobile and active register than this one, guilty from time to time of inadequate performances. It cannot be said that Ozon's film is a stalemate, but it is very little compared to his filmography that has works far more memorable than this.
