Maxime Hermet | L'amie de l'été (Summer Friends) / 2021

august

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maxime Hermet (screenwriter and director) L'amie de l'été (Summer Friends) / 2021 [24 minutes]

 

Summer Friends represents a subgenre in itself, not merely a kind of “coming out” gay film, but a work in which young men or women, ages 15-17, suddenly become aware of their sexuality—in this case two boys, Tom (Tim Rosseau) and Ellis (Jean Aviat) who, without knowing it are in love with one another, but project their adolescent hormones on a beautiful young Parisian girl, slightly older that they, Lucie (Syrine Conesa). Lucie is all a small-town French kid might desire: stunningly beautiful, with fully-developed breasts, a boyfriend back in Paris, and a highly flirtatious personality, willing to let the two younger boys into her life, perceiving, perhaps, what they don’t yet know: that if they are not “brothers” that they still share a bond that is highly intimate and probably sexual.

 

     Lucie even flirts with their possible homosexuality, challenging them, when they lose a beer drinking contest, to exchange the fluid in each other’s mouth. The boys object, protesting that they are not “fags,” but we have already realized that over the years in their varying fishing episodes they have grown so intimate that even they cannot perceive it. Ellis, in particular, is at first slightly jealous of Tom’s interest in the new girl; but in an attempt at normative heterosexual behavior actually is the first to attempt to “court” her—a world that given these boys’ immaturity is actually quite appropriate.    

  Ellis awkwardly dances with her, the full time looking back upon his friend Tom on the beach. But when Lucie decides to take a swim, Tom joins her, while Ellis looks on with the same longing that Tom had previously expressed. What they do not comprehend is that their longing is not for Lucie but each another.

       And when they return from their very sexually suggestive swim, Ellis punishes the couple by throwing beach debris and sand upon them. If it first appears as a kind of joke, it quickly becomes clear that something else is happening. When he finally runs off, leaving them behind, we know, even if the two boys do not, that he is not only jealous but afraid he has lost his friend’s love forever. What do you do when you discover that your friend is more than that? It long been a subject of gay cinema, which I partially explored in my essay on films “How to Lose Your Best Friend” in discussing the significant short films such as Sophie Boyce’s Dear Friend (2011), Lucas Mac Dougall’s Nightfall (2012), Stéphane Riethauser’s Prora (2012), Jens Choong’s Reel (2013), and Leandro Tadashi’s Tomorrow (2014).

       Yet the “Summer Boy’s” subgenre is even more powerful, as Prora, this film, and others of its type reveal. It does not simply engage the possibility of losing one’s best friend, but the entire process of growing older, moving on to a different stage of one’s life. We know when the summer is over that at least one of the boys will have to accept facts about himself that will forever change his future, that the girl who stands so glimmeringly beautiful on the beach is not what he truly wants. That sudden revelation is perhaps one of the most poignant moments in all gay boys’ life, a desire that does yet quite know its source but subconsciously recognizes it as something that society and, even more importantly, the “other” knows, now perhaps moving off in an entirely different direction.

        In this case Tom chases after him, he too perhaps desiring what he doesn’t yet realize. But when he finally captures him, Ellis’ kiss results in his pushing away his friend, as Lucie comes up, like a ghostly challenger wondering what has happened to her boyish playthings.

       As she sees Ellis running away, Tom sitting under a tree in utter confusion, she sits beside him, providing him with a kiss and the sexual release which will provide him, perhaps, with his future sexual definition. The boys’ “summer” idylls are forever over. Everything has changed. Worst of all, Ellis has recognized the he is different. That his childhood idyll had been something entirely different from his friend’s. It is the most painful moments for a young man, to realize that someone you love has been living in another concurrent world, and that you must now go your own way alone, perhaps without even the support of the boyhood friend you so deeply love.  August. It is an “august” seasonal change that is utterly devastating to a young man suddenly forced to recognize his childhood summer is over.

       In Hermet’s lovely film, the two, Tom and Lucie, return to Ellis on the beach, now all three feeling an intense guilt. She attempts to laugh it off as describing them as two lovebirds, and even seems willing to escape by herself in their boat. They can only both join up again to prevent her leaving them alone.

 

    But the voyage back with Tom and Lucie sitting side-by-side and Ellis alone at the front of their boat, expresses it all. When Lucie leaves for the day, Tom apologizes for his reaction and even dares to ask if his friend is “in love” with him, as if anything Ellis might say could further explain the kiss. At least, in the case, Tom sits down in the boat with Ellis, putting his arm around him, assuring him that he will remain his friend—if not the lover Ellis might have imagined him to be. But clearly their eternal summers have come to an end. And even if Tom and Lucie have agreed to meet up again the next day, I would seriously doubt that Ellis may join them.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).