Summer of 85 (2020)

François Ozon's Summer of 85 arrives dressed as a sunlit memory piece, all Super 16 grain and Normandy coastline, and spends its first act convincing us it is about sailing and motorcycles and the ache of being sixteen. It is, in fact, about death, which the protagonist announces almost immediately, and about the way a first love curdles into an obsession that ends with a boy dancing on a grave. The film adapts Aidan Chambers' 1982 novel Dance on My Grave, and it carries that book's solemn teenage romanticism without apology.

The central relationship is between Alexis and David, two boys whose six weeks together constitute the entire emotional architecture of the picture. This is a same-sex romance rendered with full intimacy, and the film treats it as neither scandal nor thesis. It simply is. The casting reflects that commitment, though the surrounding world stays resolutely white and French, and the film has no interest in interrogating the fact. Women appear as mothers and as a romantic rival, and the screenplay declines to build an argument around them. There is no racial dimension, no environmental concern, no economic critique, no attention to body image or neurodiversity. The film is too busy being lyrical to lecture, and its narration about love and dying stays in the register of personal philosophy.

Strip away the cataloguing and a wistful, occasionally overwrought period romance remains, one that understands adolescent idealization better than most of its peers. Ozon is not preaching. He is remembering, or pretending to. For the viewer sorting films by social consciousness, the pickings are slim and the mood is elegiac. The film earns its emotional keep honestly, which is its own kind of virtue.