Gregory Oke | Été / 2017

summer idyll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory Oke (screenwriter and director) Été / 2017 [19 mintues]

The British director Gregory Oke, who made this film as part of his graduating requirement from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, begins it with a blurred and distorted image from French television, which quickly reforms into an image of the lush Herefordshire green landscape where a young man, Rhys (Dan Patridge)—listening in his car to the music of French singer Jacques Dutronc while studying French from a tape—is working the summer as a sheep shearer.

     His fellow shearer, the handsome Freddie (David Burnett) knocks at the window, teasing his friend for his French obsession, reminding him that it is time to return to work. And throughout this 19-minute film there are several scenes altering between lunch breaks with the two working mates, their performing their shearing tasks, a bit in the macho rhythm and dance of director Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999).

     Rhys is studying French not only because of his admiration of hip music sensation Dutronc, but his love of a young French woman, Emma (Rhiannon Handy) who is visiting England. The couple discuss Rhys’ traveling to France and staying in a local hotel while he visits her. And in one important long scene, they join Freddie, his girlfriend, and others on a beach picnic where Rhys seems to be playing games of balance in a culvert with Emma while his handsome friend and his girlfriend stare out moodily at the nearby stream, the one representing the trope of play, the other an image filmmakers love to flash before our eyes as a symbol of enduring love.

     But that is just the problem. As we glean from the brief lunch sessions and shearing episodes between the two males—all highly homoerotic—Rhys is unconsciously falling in love with his co-worker, observing the hair in his armpits, how his well-muscled body moves, etc.

     A drive in the country with Rhys and Emma seems about to spill over from a deep kissing session into a sexual incident, but Emma almost immediately perceives something is wrong, and when Rhys comes up for air it is clear to her that his outer actions do not match his inner emotions. Even he, becoming aware of it, sits moodily for a moment before attempting to make another go at it, she finally refusing and the two breaking off, she demanding her drive her home.

      No words are exchanged, no scenes of our confused young hero pondering the situation or even leaning into a closer relationship with the object of his sexual confusion. Rhys knows that despite Freddie’s good-natured, sometimes hands-on teasing, there is no hope for his growing sexual desires to be quelled. The only release between the two of them is through music, and this case the music of “outsiders,” Dutronc and his wife Françoise Hardy, representing the Francophone obsession of a British citizen.

      We come to learn of Rhys’ growing tension primarily through the richly-hewed, sensual, views of landscape and characters by director Oke, using a palette and lens closer to Luciano Visconti’s than to most other current younger filmmakers. And often his framing, with important elements visualized at the edges and corners of the image, help to reveal more about the meaning than the narrative at its center.

      Inevitably, during a night of drinking and pool playing at a local pub with friends, Freddie carries his good-natured joshing of Rhys too far, putting his arm around the boy in the toilet as he mocks a yawn, hinting of the breakup of Rhys and Emma. Soon after, the young sheep shearer explodes into violence, slugging the man he loves endlessly until Freddie wrestles him down the ground and back into reality. Rhys goes storming off as the others, shocked, stare after him, one describing him as a psycho.

      Back in his room, Rhys pounds the bed in despair. In the last scene he returns to music, his only outlet for sexual release, as his sings along in French, in karaoke-style, with his idol, Dutronc.

       Été is a beautiful and restrained film that reveals a remarkable talent for filmmaking that one hopes results in a feature film.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).