'Summer of '85': François Ozon's Young Romance is Best At Its Sunniest [TIFF Review]

“Don’t take me for a psycho,” Alexis, the protagonist of François Ozon’s “Summer of ’85,” explains in the film’s opening voice-over. “Corpses are not my thing… Corpses are not my thing. They have a terrible effect on me. Actually, one corpse had a terrible effect on me.” Yet at the conclusion of that pitch-black opening, which is written and framed like a murderer’s confession, Ozon slams into upbeat New Wave music and beautiful bodies on a sunny beach, a single cut that summarizes the style (and, perhaps, the biggest flaw) of the French filmmaker’s latest.

The place is a seaside resort in Normandy; the time, unsurprisingly, is the summer of 1985. Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) is a 16-year-old seeking out the pleasures of sun, flesh, and water. But he’s a little lost; early on, he flips his borrowed boat in a storm. Luckily, he’s captured by a David (Benjamin Voisin), a handsome stranger, and as soon as he’s introduced, Alexis’ voice-over pops in with a bit of important information: “He’s the future corpse.”

Ozon’s screenplay, adapted from Aidan Chambers’ novel “Dance on My Grave,” uses these bleak peeks into the future as framing device. Alexis has been charged with “explaining” the motive for his crime (“The judge needs a reason for his behavior”), and the scenes of that reckoning and punishment run parallel to the sweet, “Call Me By Your Name”-style boy-meets-boy story at the center.

Those passages, dramatizing the fumbling beginnings of what might be a friendship and might be more, are the picture’s best. Ozon and his gifted young actors keenly capture the uncertainty of that “is he or isn’t he” moment, and how it manifests itself in little nitpicks and awkwardness. There is an evocative image of the pair riding a roller coaster, and if this has become easy shorthand (a cliché, even) for teen courtship, it’s especially poignant here; under the duress of the ride, they allow themselves to lose control, even if only for a moment. (This entire sequence is a parade of sexual metaphors, as they shoot guns, go through tunnels, throw punches at homophobic bullies, etc.)

Finally, Alexis and David take the plunge, and while Ozon doesn’t linger on the details (“We all want to know the secrets behind closed doors,” Alexis says, pointedly), we get a sense of the thrilling intimacy of this six-week relationship – a summer fling, really. “I couldn’t get enough of him,” Alexis recalls, and what “Summer of ‘85” understands and recreates, above all else, the center-of-the-world intensity of first love, how you don’t even know what love is, at that age, but this must be it. Or, as Alexis puts it, “I loved him as much as you understand the meaning of the word.”

But then, it all goes awry; the young men meet Kate (Philippine Velge), a British beauty, and Alexis pops in again: “That was where the end began.” Three, as we all know, is a crowd, and once David gets Kate in his sights, he’s done with Alexis; he uses him up and throws him away, unapologetically, in a cruel and heartbreaking break-up scene in which he says the meanest thing you can say to someone who loves you: “You bore me.”

And then… well, let’s not delve into exactly what happens to David, and to Alexis after, but suffice it to say that after effectively hanging a dark cloud over this sunny story, the wraparound ends up writing a check the rest of the movie can’t cash. The specifics seem, frankly, not worthy of the sturm und drang that Ozon whips up, and as a result, the picture’s turn to straight-up melodrama is a little clumsy.

Which is not to say there aren’t elements of the film – even after that turn – that don’t work. Lefebvre and Voisin are both marvelous young actors, while Velge smoothly sidesteps narrative villainy by merely projecting a good heart. And Lefebvre has two scenes late in the movie, a profoundly sad morgue visit and breakdown at a gravesite, where his powerful acting borders on feral; you have that terrifying sense, while watching him, that he may have really gone under, and might not be ok after.

“Summer of ’85” is ultimately not entirely successful, because its disparate tones don’t always mesh. But more than that, the carefree, romantic stuff is so enjoyable, and so sincere, that in retrospect, one wishes the entire film had lived there – both in that flush of first love (or at least lust), and in reckoning afterward with the complexities of that emotion. [B-]

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