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