A cool wind is blowing on the French cinema. A summer breeze, redolent with the spray, the normans, the joy-riding in a motorcycle, the funfair, the loves of vacation and tubes new wave. This Summer 85, it will be thirty-five years, François Ozon was waiting for him. He was 18 years old at the time, ask heaps of questions about its future and devour the book for teenagers from Aidan Chambers : Dance of the cuckoo (Dance on My Grave, original title). Very quickly, he understands that this initiation novel, which tells the romance of two young boys in a seaside town in the south of England, could well serve as a starting point for his first film. With a buddy, he wrote the script, and then puts it into a corner, and forget it. Shortly after Thanks to God (2019), Ozon finds, by chance, the book of Chambers and the emotion is the same as in the first reading. “For years, I dreamed it might be adapted by Gus Van Sant or by Rob Reiner, the director of Stand by Me. Someone makes a great teen movie in the us. But the movies do when they need to be done : it was for me, and it was now. “
The history reviewed and revisited by Ozon, this is the one of Alex and David, and Felix Lefebvre and Benjamin’s Neighbour, both excellent – the two young boys of Tréport, who meet on their boats respective while the first comes from capsizing. Calypso comes in to help Pat-ass, and the charisma of David will quickly disturb the romantic Alex. Over this summer of all possibilities, where the young people taste the fun, the feelings, where the child becomes an adult, writes to default to be able to say, and learn to be resilient at its expense, Ozon we walk in his memories of the 1980s.
His playlist ? “In Between Days” The Cure, obviously, but also “Sailing” Rod Stewart – if possible listened to the background in a Walkman, or even “Cruel Summer” of Bananarama. “1985 is the year of the death of Rock Hudson. The world lives its last moments of carelessness and innocence before aids came all the sealing. “
Winks
To accentuate the nostalgia of that time, the film is shot entirely in film, in Super 16 : “It was the format of my first short films. I love its grain, if particular. This gives a sensuality on the skin, a color saturation, that is lost with the digital, which tends to lose its savour a bit of everything. “Bland, the mother of David is not, far from it. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays a character on the edge of hysteria, which reminds the mother to both accomplice and devouring of Suddenly last summer by Tennessee Williams. Ozon sets up, here and there, winks, and references to his own films – the cross-dressing that can also be found in A summer dress and A new friend, the morgue Under the sand, the cemetery Frantz, etc
” In fact, it is the opposite. All of these themes which are dear to my cinema already existed in the book of Chambers. I realize today how much he influenced me. “There’s a Salinger in the Ozon, there’s Xavier Dolan, too, and – more surprising – the Claude Pinoteau. Yes, Been 85 also makes a nice tribute to The Boom, as the director was seen at the age of 13 years old and range in a good place in his cult movies. “At the time, there was not a boom, where no one is resorting to the scene of the Walkman “, he recalls, moved. You said nostalgia ?
In the dining room.
