At 52, François Ozon produced “Summer 85”, an adaptation of a novel which he dreamed of at the end of his adolescence. Like a first film that would contain all of the following.
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–François Ozon between his two actors, Félix Lefebvre (Alex) and Benjamin Voisin (David), either, admits the director, the teenager he was in 1985 and the adult he would become.
FILMCOOPI / DR
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–François Ozon, 52, 19 films and a twentieth already filming.
LIENARD/GETTY IMAGES
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In the iodized sun of Le Touquet, two teenagers will love each other for “a few million seconds”, the time of a summer. What could be more trivial than a first time, even between boys? The careful reconstruction of the year 1985, Rod Steward-style boom tubes in earplugs and another tank top indented on a shark tooth necklace, does not revolutionize the subject of fatal attractions any more. Alex and David roll shovels to the sound of the waves which soon run aground on the beach of weariness and jealousy. What could be more banal, really.
However, “Summer 85” turns out to be fascinating in its fruitful provocation. Against all expectations, the shock of candor claimed in the face of the perversities of the romantic relationship, beyond the wounds of ego and acne scars, brings to life a vocation. “Do you think we invent those we love?” pleads the young hero when he realizes the micmac of reality and fiction. A writer in the making, Alexis who, in search of identity, calls himself Alex, then frantically sleeps his adventure in notebooks. “The most important thing is to escape its history,” concludes the budding artist.
Sublime the criminal scheme
A profession of faith that the filmmaker Ozon has never ceased to implement, he who readily admits that this 19th film is in fact the first, at least the one that he would have liked to make at the age of the heroes of “Summer”. 85 ”. In fact, this plot contains the hobbies, obsessions, motifs which now constitute a work. Thus the criminal scheme that opens “Summer 85”. The (crime) director has often left clues to a romantic plot. His master stroke in the matter lies in “8 women” (2002), comedy à la Agatha Christie with George Cukor.
Here, a police plot extends its gray areas to the solar romance. From the first images, a voiceover presents David: “the future corpse”. Her lover, keen on Egyptology, willingly takes a bathtub for a sarcophagus, etc. The morbid tone, omnipresent in the adolescent age, is given. Alex is imprisoned for having danced on the grave of his friend, an episode which evokes “Frantz” (2016), when Ozon seized the same voodoo. Other coincidences abound.
Mourn
So twenty years ago, with “Sous le sable” (2000), also located in a provincial seaside resort, the confidential author found his first popular success. Revenant Charlotte Rampling mourns both her youth and her late love in spectacular denial. The sea, this time, sparkles to the point of blinding, like the salt water which splashes the sailing sequences in “Summer 85”, where the lovers swim in complete happiness, their skins shining like sparkling sharks. “Swimming Pool” (2003), in a Mediterranean pool, radiates such dazzling sensuality.
Before seducing the bombshell boys as fatal as the brunette of “Summer 85”, Ludivine Sagnier played the boys in “Drops of water on hot stones”. This Fassbinder demon never lives far from Ozon.
Assume his evil genius
Barely older than Alex, David manipulates him at leisure, an eternal component of passion according to the director, see, at random, the modern chronicle “5×2” (2004), the melo “Angel” (2007), the comedy ” Potiche ”(2010), etc. Added to this is a critique of the bourgeoisie in little music of sour feelings. Over the years, the subtle Ozon hardly varies in the tone of its sarcasm. This son of a good Catholic family prefers subversive humor to frontal demolition. Another of his favorite performers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is working wonderfully here, to camp a mother hen on the verge of nervous breakdown and assumed ridicule.
Flirting with the margins
This keen sense of nuance is often found in “Summer 85” of miraculous resolutions. Cross-dressing, a major theme of “A New Friend” (2014), rattles in high heels and flashes in a flowery dress in a tragicomic sequence in the morgue. What is a true friend, if not a girl who lends her clothes to a boy to go and kiss her lover one last time at the crematorium?
“I was his teacher. He was my student “
Another striking dialogue, capable of opening dizzying narrative abysses, this laconic comment from Alex’s mentor: “I was his teacher. He was my student. ” More than explaining the nature of their relationship, the observation creates confusion. Here again, the episode refers to another film, “In the house” (2012), on the ambiguous link between an attractive gifted teenager manipulating his French master. In this matter, last year, “Thanks to God” dispelled the doubt head-on on sexual tolerance between adults and children. The referenced style exercise seems endless. Thus, in his next film, François Ozon stages Sophie Marceau. The Vic of the 80s is already in this one.
