Review: François Ozon’s Summer of 85 Is As Confused As Its Protagonist’s Feelings

François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.

Summer of 85
Photo: Music Box Films

François Ozon’s films tend toward one of two registers. There’s the aloof melancholy of films like Young & Beautiful, Under the Sand, and Time to Leave, where the characters are prone to demonstrating their suffering impassively. A sense that the spontaneous expression of feeling would be too vulgar a slip-up is unmistakable from how they keep their poker faces, creating enough drama for turns of events not to ever be as consequential as the overall narrative premise, from a woman’s husband mysteriously disappearing while swimming at sea to a gay man coping with a terminal illness that isn’t AIDS.

And then there’s Ozon’s more tongue-in-cheek fare, like Potiche and Water Drops on Burning Rocks, purposefully hokey comedies that, in the end, struggle to actually make us laugh. That’s because it always seems like Ozon might be taking the piss by daring us to mistake the cartoonishness of the film for something other than an over-the-top masking of some other, more perverse, layer. Laughing would mean not to “get” it. Summer of 85 belongs to this latter type of film, for the way Ozon wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.

The film is set in a seaside town in Normandy in the ’80s and told in nonlinear fashion. All we know at first is that someone has died, and that 16-year-old Alexis (Félix Lefebvre, recalling a more cherubic River Phoenix) is being interrogated about his involvement in the death. Through flashbacks, Ozon pieces the backstory together until we understand the circumstances of the tragedy and why Alexis is supposedly responsible for it.

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The flashbacks kick off with an encounter between Alexis and David (Benjamin Voisin), a very clingy stranger who saves Alexis from drowning at sea. Next thing we know, Alexis is at David’s house and his over-animated mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is stripping him naked so he can take a bath, even though he doesn’t want to. When David and Alexis go out that night, they run into a drunken stranger (Yoann Zimmer) and David insists that they take care of him. As Alexis watches as David combs the passed-out stranger’s hair, he understands that his new friend’s mojo is preying on pretty boys who are in danger in order to hook up with them.

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Somehow, even after all sorts of signs of David’s creepiness, Alexis falls for him. It doesn’t make much sense, but at least it leads to a beautiful nightclub sequence where the young men dance away to Movie Music’s infectious 1982 song “Stars de La Pub,” culminating in David handing Alexis a Walkman so that he can be taken away by Rod Stewart’s “Sailing.” Bathos seamlessly becomes pathos in this brief sequence, and in this sequence alone.

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Stewart sings as Alexis sinks into a state of complete enchantment. It’s as if falling in love were a physically observable process. We can almost see the feeling spread through David’s body, limb by limb, pulling him out of sync from the world, as Stewart goes on singing, and the bodies around the lovers move to a completely different tune: “Through the dark night, far away I am dying, forever crying to be with you.”

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Unfortunately, Ozon’s cinematic commitment to a convoluted and largely unconvincing plot has already been set in stone by that point. And it must continue to unfold, like a protracted exegesis. This unfolding, after such a heartrending sequence, bears the dullness of a bureaucratic task. By allowing us to witness such a raw emotional connection between David and Alexis, Ozon makes the film’s affectation hard to swallow. Though we get irresistible scenes of lovers lying naked post-coitus reciting poetry to each other, even these normally luscious situations are neutered by the certainty that, in due time, they will be replaced by narrative explanations meant to draw the film to a close through logic, not feeling.

Score: 
 Cast: Félix Lefebvre, Benjamin Voisin, Philippine Velge, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Melvil Poupaud, Isabelle Nanty, Yoann Zimmer  Director: François Ozon  Screenwriter: François Ozon  Distributor: Music Box Films  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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