François Ozon’s 'Summer of 85' — a gay teen romance out of France — might be easily mistaken for a Call Me By Your Name hand-me-down. It's not. Read our review
starts with the proclamations of an inexplicably gloomy young man — OK, a 16-year-old — named Alexis , who tells us up front that he’s obsessed with death. Not corpses, not gore, but death itself. “Bathtubs already remind me of coffins,” he tells us — a strange sentiment from such a bright, hopeful face as his. But it’s also a tip of the hat to Ozon’s tone throughout this movie, which allows its young hero to toe the line of morose self-pity of youth without dripping into parody.
It takes us back to the heat of that summer; New Order on the soundtrack is but one of the nods to the moment confirming that the ‘85 of the title is to be taken literally, but also as a marker of distance: a sense of retrospective romanticizing adds the already-lush romance of the story. David saves Alexis during a mishap at sea; they instantly become inseparable.
Yet it’s often the stuff surrounding their ties to each other that proves even richer, more daring. We’re strung along by the utter mystery of whatever it is that earns David the status of a “future corpse,” in Alexis’s telling; but we’re compelled, too, by the tensions in their lives: the teacher encouraging Alexis to become a writer despite the working-class hyperfocus of his father, for example, or the efforts, in the film’s other half, of an investigator to make it all make sense.
And the feeling all the more tangible, even as Alexis’s reflective obsession with death feels overdone, distracting. Lefebvre and Voisin are more than charismatic: They’re seamless, casual, with only those nods to teenage moroseness pulling us sideways, not because they’re dark, but because the darkness lacks for a philosophical center, despite its gestures toward that fact. This is intentional: Alexi is a teenager.
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