Our Eternal Summer lives in the heady space of youth, where the summers are endless and hazy. It opens with a VO that lets you know one of the young protagonists doesn’t make it through the summer, you quickly realize this is Lola, a character full of life, who drowns. However, because of the narrative devices of the film, it becomes less clear if that is indeed who the VO was talking about as Lise, Lola’s best friend, also slips away that summer. Although the film ends on hopeful dialogue from Lise, there is room for interpretation. This is because of the direct-to-camera interviews the other primary characters engage in. Some of which cannot be about Lola. One could take them to be about Lise and that she’s also dead. However, another explanation for those videos is they’re part of an art piece made by a future Lise, sometime after the summer, as a way to explore and deal with grief. This would track better with her final lines about choosing to live.
The early part of the film has an easy, slice-of-life feel to it that’s slowly undermined and made almost sinister as it’s intercut with the interview clips. This breaks the tranquility of both their summer and the film by reminding you that someone is dying soon.
The teens talk in the way friends do, about everything and nothing at the same time. And then Lola dies. The gang fractures, and Lise retreats. Lise can’t connect with her old gang at all anymore. And then she meets Marlon as she stares at the ocean, the same one that took Lola her.
Marlon recognizes that she’s not just staring at the water, but might be staring at the water with intent to harm herself, and he gets her off that metaphoric ledge in the most stereotypical French way I can imagine. He gives her a cigarette. Of course, it’s more nuanced than that; it’s that he took the time to notice she was in need, but the film did not shy away from the image of French people and their love of cigarettes. This act of Marlon’s, followed by him bringing her back to his shared place with his fellow performance artists.
While Lise stays with the artists, hiding from her family and friends, in a possible attempt to escape reminders of Lola, she has a conversation with Marlon that confused me due to how they met. As previously mentioned, they met because he thought she was going to harm herself, however, when the top of loss comes up and she says she understands loss, he dismisses her, says that she doesn’t, belittling her very real feelings. It didn’t track with how they met and seemed contrived to make her cry so he could embrace her at the end of the scene.
The film is only 75-minutes and may have been better served to focus more fully on Lise’s journey once she left her old gang. Either that, or make the film longer to accommodate its large cast because outside of Lise, the other’s journeys it tracked were undeveloped, and Lise/Lola, their friendship, and what that loss meant to Lise was strong enough to carry the film on its own.
The film didn’t shy away from nudity, more often casual than sexual, just another aspect of life, as casually captured as the conversations. The filming often had a documentary feel to, almost unscripted, and I don’t know if that is a reflection of the actors and director Émilie Aussel following the script (written by Émilie Aussel, Yacine Baddy, and Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam) or if Émilie utilized a more free-style filming approach, using extended takes with the actors ad-libbing in character. Particularly the teens during the beach scenes have a raw naturalness to them. That’s not to say the film felt unscripted. The scene where Rita talks to Lise about her journey to finding herself after a loss is the stuff of monologues, while at the beginning of the film when Lola purports her philosophy on human connection that is the stuff of poets and philosophers.
While it never becomes clear what performance Marlon and co. are preparing for, what it’s even about, being around them as they work on it helps Lise heal, and the three actors commit to the performances, drawing on all the actorly warmups they’ve undoubtedly done over the years. The final act we see of their show involves a whole lot of glitter hitting them, which I’m sure lingered for days after. It would be tempting to say it could’ve been scrapped, and saved production money and the actors the inconvenience, as on the surface it’s only sparkly like the glitter. But it makes for a nice parallel to the water in its ability to refract light. Water that took Lola from Lise, and to which, after this scene, Lise is finally able to return.
It played at Locarno Film Festival in their Concorso Cineasti del presente section.