«Summer 85: François Ozon's talent and clichés

François Ozon is back with Summer 85. After Thanks be to God in which he denounced pedophilia in the Church, preceded by the psychological thriller The Double Lover and many other important works, the French director immerses himself in his own adolescence, that of the eighties. In this context, the filmmaker tells the story of a new, beautiful and sexual friendship that ends in tragedy after six weeks. Welcome to a great film with a few stereotypes, but above all a lot of intelligence and heart.

He has an eye for images. And that's a good thing for a filmmaker. François Ozon has accustomed his audiences to a high level of artistic quality, with films that verge on formal perfection while remaining mainstream. Summer 85 had to live up to its billing, and it does. Undeniably enchanting, unquestionably beautiful, it follows in the footsteps of the previous films, while having the singularity of not being very surprising. A summer romance in which one young man befriends, and then befriends a little more, another young man who is very charming, but very charming... we know how it's all going to end. Especially as we're immediately put in the mood - it's the main character, Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), echoing Ozon as a teenager, who speaks up to warn us: if you don't like death, this isn't the film for you.

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Of course, the story of this corpse, which Alexis warns us in the first minute of the film is that of a person he loved passionately, will not be the same as the story of a person he loved passionately. exactly the one you expect. Nevertheless, the general pattern is familiar: love leads to weariness, weariness leads to betrayal, betrayal leads to tragedy, tragedy leads to death. Not to mention a form of love triangle, otherwise it wouldn't be funny. But François Ozon's genius lies in serving up something quite different from what he's done before, using the eternal couple as a starting point. Eros and Thanatos (love and death) and the most banal of phenomena (heartbreak) to take us on a nostalgic melodrama in which art appears to be the only salvation.

It's through flashbacks that the film proceeds, adding to the retro dimension of Ozon's nineteenth feature, and it's the writing of a story that will bring Alexis out of her pain. Summer 85 itself has a lot to do with literature: it is in fact an adaptation of The Cuckoo Dance (Dance on my Grave) by Aidan Chambers, which left its mark on the director when he was seventeen. The film's temporal framework is thus understood as a period apart, a little out of time, on which Ozon rests his gaze without fantasizing about it. On the contrary, with the omnipresence of death as a backdrop, this film echoes the trauma experienced by an entire generation with the AIDS epidemic, also very present in the latest works of writer Philippe Besson.

But if the film is beautiful, albeit dark, it's thanks to the grain rendered by the filming process. It's also due to the soundtrack vintage which includes The Cure and Ecran Total 80. Last but not least, it's the beauty of David (Benjamin Voisin), as irritating as he is fascinating. To the beauty of his clothes eighties, The film could have been based on this character. The film could have been based on this character, but it instead highlights, from Alexis's point of view, the opposition between the two boys, which we wonder could be a complementarity. While Alexis loves beings (people or abstract entities), David loves events, activities. It's a profound opposition that arises from their more glaring differences, and signals the beginning of the end. In an atmosphere where, under the patronage of James Dean, living one's life to the end means moving towards death. Fury, when you hold us.

There's the stereotypical Jewish business family, the egotistical bisexual who toys with his partners, and the eccentricity of a deceased father and possessive, even incestuous mother. But these clichés don't detract from the film; on the contrary, they accentuate the ease with which we enter a magical, if tragic, moment, and draw attention to the constructed nature of fictions as a means of remembering reality - and making sense of it. Summer 85 is a film that will count for something in Ozon's career, and in any case calls for a trip to the cinema.

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Filmcoopi