When it comes to crafting intense, serious-minded movies
that really do justice to the disruptive and soul-shaking experience of falling
in love, few filmmakers do it like filmmakers working in France do it these
days. The Closing Night film in this year’s BFI Flare festival, Catherine
Corsini’s superb Summertime (La Belle Saison)
is another case in point, delicately and intelligently presenting the romance
that develops between two women in the early 1970s.
Delphine (Izïa Higelin) is a country girl who’s diligently
worked on her family farm for years but who’s enjoying a taste of independence
and freedom in Paris. There, during a feminist protest, she meets Carole
(Cécile de France), an older woman who’s in a relationship with a man but who’s
gradually swept up by Delphine’s passion for her. But when Delphine’s father suffers
a stroke, and she returns to the farm and a way of life she still feels deeply
connected to, the women’s relationship is tested, to stay the least.
A (sometimes explicit) love story between two women of
contrasting goals, backgrounds and temperaments caught up in mutual attraction,
Summertime’s obvious reference point is Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue
is the Warmest Colour, and Corsini’s movie definitely seems to have
taken some inspiration from that film thematically and also stylistically (note
the camera’s lingering gaze on Delphine as she smokes or reads alone in the
early scenes).
Yet Summertime carves out its own
identity as it progresses and involves the viewer on its own terms. The opening
Paris-set scenes are a little bit too insistent in demonstrating that
Second-Wave Feminism Was Fun: happy and giggling, Carole and her sisters take
to the city streets to stage protests and interventions scored to Janis Joplin
tracks. But the love story develops compellingly, and the film really hits its
stride when Carole joins Delphine for a visit at the family farm, the two women
keeping the true nature of their relationship hidden from Delphine’s quiet and
watchful Mother (Noémie Lvovsky) , who’s briefly – and
very touchingly – liberated by Carole’s restless presence, as the three work
side by side on the farm. (The farm scenes suggest a version of the feminist
utopia Carole’s promoted - but not a
version she’d want to hang around in for too long.)
For those of us who’ve been used to seeing de France short-haired
and self-contained in films such as The Singer and The Kid With A Bike, her
passionate performance here is a pleasurable surprise. She’s well-matched by the excellent Higelin who makes Delphine a compelling – sometimes frustrating – mixture
of forthrightness and reticence. And after Haynes’s Carol,
which blanded out Highsmith’s knotty characters to a disappointing degree, it’s
refreshing to see a film that recognises that two women in love aren’t
magically exempt from the selfishness, casual cruelty and communication
failures to which all relationships are subject.
In a scene whose significance isn’t realised until the
film’s sublime final moments, Delphine talks about the boggy terrain of her
native land, the way it seems to hold her back, the way she sinks into it. A number of recent films – from John Crowley's Brooklyn to Lamberto Sanfelice’s
Chlorine - have focused on the rites of passage of young
women faced with a choice between familial responsibility and desire for
something different: a choice that’s been defined in these movies as a choice
about place. Summertime is a distinguished addition to that
company. A distinction between country and city life is also at the heart of this
movie, but Corsini is balanced in her presentation of it, showing the
seductions and drawbacks of both urban and rural spaces in gay experience. And unlike Brooklyn, whose
conclusion felt contrived and fake to me, Corsini judges her ending perfectly
here, building the drama to a heart-rendingly poignant finale that’s truly worthy
of this most beautiful and believable of love stories.
Summertime screens at BFI Flare on 26 and 27 March.
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