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LOCARNO 2021 Cineasti del presente

Review: Our Eternal Summer

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- This debut feature film by young French director Émilie Aussel speaks of adolescence in all its mysterious and ambiguous beauty

Review: Our Eternal Summer
Marcia Feugeas in Our Eternal Summer

After a series of short films portraying adolescence courageously, realistically and without false modesty, Émilie Aussel’s first feature film Our Eternal Summer [+see also:
trailer
interview: Émilie Aussel
film profile
]
sees her once again tackling the torments but also the insouciance of a difficult age where the world reveals its cruel side for the very first time.

In competition at the Locarno Film Festival within the Cineasti del presente line-up, Our Eternal Summer follows a group of youngsters grappling with a trauma which they seem incapable of coming to terms with; an open wound which has stripped them of the innocence characterising their former lives as invincible heroes. Taking pleasure in a summer which seems to go on forever, enjoying the last fleeting moments of their childhood which is now at an end, and waiting to turn into adults without really knowing what this actually involves is the fate in store for the protagonists of Émilie Aussel’s first feature.

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An endless succession of days marked by a deliciously lethargic dolce far niente, and nights where anything in the world seems entirely possible is the everyday reality of a group of eighteen-year-olds from the South of France, youngsters who believe that nothing can bring them down, not even the sea which turns from an ally into the most ferocious of enemies. The unexpected loss of a friend who knew all their deepest, darkest secrets marks a breaking point for the group, a passage from innocence to vulnerability when their lives seem to suddenly slip like sand between their fingers. How do you come to terms with a trauma which cuts deep? How do you survive and eventually return to life when your body and mind seem beyond your control? With Our Eternal Summer, Émilie Aussel urges us to think about the brutal reality of dealing with loss at a young age, a void which swallows up the innocence and insouciance you believed to be eternal, like a black hole. The carefree daily lives of the teenage group, their bodies and their still febrile faces contrast sharply with the grave and devastating event which nobody could have foreseen. Émilie Aussel seems to want to tell us that life is just a concentrate of contrasting feelings and desires, an emotional whirlpool which we will all have to contend with, sooner or later. The film’s settings and its ethereal and mysterious photography add yet another layer of ambiguity and drama to the vicissitudes of these adolescents, who are each fighting to survive in their own different ways. By way of an unspoken language, their faces, which are often foregrounded by the director, convey their inner worlds and the private landscape which imprisons them.

The film’s music, meanwhile, coming courtesy of the duo Postcoïtum whom the director has collaborated with on more than one occasion, transports the images (and characters) into a mysterious and unreal world where tragedy takes on disproportionate dimensions, and innocence and insouciance seem to melt away by magic. Our Eternal Summer is a film that is best enjoyed without haste, much like adolescence itself: an experience which is both personal and collective, and characterised by solitude, friendship and love, but also cruelty and instinctivity.

Our Eternal Summer is produced by Shellac (France), who are also handling international sales.

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(Translated from Italian)

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