François Ozon | Été 85 (Summer of 85) / 2020

dancing to death

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Ozon (screenwriter and director) Été 85 (Summer of 85) / 2020

 

Given that the major figures of François Ozon’s most recent film features two young men, 16-year-old Alexis (who prefers to be called Alex) and a two to three year older boy David (Benjamin Voisin), it seems highly unlikely that issues of denial and delusion should have already settled into their personalities. Except for the fact that both, in different ways, are fascinated with death—Alex, like many young people simply being fascinated with the rituals of death in different cultures; and David, more seriously, seeking the thrill that comes from chasing after what might be dangerous—it similarly seems odd that of the four LGBTQ films from 2020 I write about in this essay on delusion and denial, only Ozon’s Summer of 85 ends in the death of one of its characters.

     That is not to say that the director doesn’t warn us that something in this otherwise seemingly gay idyll is not quite right. Even before we’ve been truly introduced to Alex we see him at the beach with his best friend with whom he is clearly looking forward to share an outing on a small sailboat. The friend tells Alex that he has a secret to share, and a few seconds later when the new “secret,” a girl with whom he has a date shows up, we can easily read signs of disappointment upon Alex’s face. Told by his friend that he can still use his boat for the day, Alex mutters something like “But it’s more fun with you,” forcing us to realize that perhaps Alex had hoped for a more intimate relationship with the other boy.

      Alex does take the boat out, anchoring it briefly to fish, but soon spots a rainstorm’s gathering clouds, with lightning on the horizon. He quickly pulls up the anchor and tacks the sail in order to return to harbor, but the winds quickly capsize the small vessel, sending him into the waters. Even his attempts to hang onto the overturned boat seem slightly futile—that is until a savior in a similarly sized boat shows up, tosses him a line, and tells him how to upright the boat before towing him back to shore.

      Clearly the slightly older boy who has just saved his life has had some experience with saving the lives of others previously, for when he invites Alex to his house, David’s mother speaks of his other rescued friends, the two of them pushing Alex into the bathroom with the mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) taking a somewhat prurient interest in pulling off his clothes so that he might take a hot bath. Before Alex can even catch his breath, David presents him with a new wardrobe pilfered from his own closet, has invited to stay to dinner and insisted that they spend the next day together. We’re now friends, David insists, before Alex, somewhat more cautiously, can even come to terms with what has so quickly occurred.

      Over the next couple of days, David and his mother have conspired that Alex should work in their small sports shop, now managed by David since of his father’s death, and planned out the rest of Alex’s summer—despite the fact that Alex had determined to continue his summer taking a creative writing course with M. Lefèvre (Melvil Poupaud) who finds his work promising. By the time David has purchased a new helmet for Alex, taken him on a daredevil ride on his motorcycle, and has purchased new pants, shirt, and hat for the boy, Alex is already in love and has begun to take over his own story by becoming the film’s narrator, now gushing about his new overwhelming passion for David while luring us on by closing the bedroom door behind the two enjoying what we can only imagine to be an utterly pleasurable night of sex. No coy coming out film is this.

      Yet even here, Ozon tosses us crumbs that might alert to the fact that despite the palpable pleasure the two take in just being around one another, these Hansels (the dictionary definition of the archaic word “hansel” is a gift given for good luck at the beginning of the year or to mark an acquisition or the start of an enterprise) may unknowingly have set out on a trip to the witch’s oven. As they walk arm in arm with each other through the streets of their provincial beach town on night, they encounter a drunk who keeps diving into the traffic. David insists, despite Alex’s protests to leave him alone, that they help him to safety. Shouldering him between them, they take the young man to the beach to drop him into the safer sands. We might simply imagine the handsome angel as showing his deep compassion, but as they pull the drunk onto his back, so our new narrator comments, he suddenly observes the man’s beautiful face which, he realizes, has probably occasioned David’s interest him; and the next morning Alex discovers that after the two of them parted for the night, David returned to the drunk on the beach, just to talk to him he claims, leaving Alex and us to suspect something else has occurred between them.

      After their wild motorcycle ride, Alex asks whether David always speeds through the roads so carelessly, moving in and out of oncoming traffic. The older boy’s answer not only confirms that he does, but that in the maneuver he is chasing as if to catch up with death, moving as close as he can possibly get to it without crossing over.

      A third clue that something strange may be underfoot is when David suddenly demands that the two share a pact that they will dance on one another’s grave of after his death. Certainly, this pact which seems to come of nowhere gives Alex some pause, but by this time he has so come under David’s spell that he cannot deny him.

      The final and most obvious bit of evidence comes almost as a repetition of the very first scene in the film, as Alex and David’s planned outing on a sailboat is interrupted by an English girl who Alex has previously met. Upon meeting her, David impulsively invites her along, suddenly shifting his attention from Alex to the intruder Kate (Philippine Velge), leading the younger boy to realize that his idyll of 10-weeks has perhaps come to a close.

      I suspect that had we been able to pick up these authorial crumbs one by one in their proper order we might have recognized another storm on the horizon. Ozon, however, cuts up his narrative after establishing the fact that something terrible has happened to David and that Alex has come under general suspicion. Refusing to speak of the events to anyone, including the psychiatrist hired by the police to help explain the inexplicable facts surrounding Alex and his friend, the creative writing teacher asks his former pupil to write out his story as if it were a fiction. Thus, we discover why Alex has become the narrator, and why a linear narrative is nearly impossible. Soon it is revealed that David has been killed in a terrible accident while riding his motorcycle, and that the previously loving and open M. Gorman now refuses any communication with Alex, believing that he been responsible for her son’s accident.

      As we move forward in what is now Alex’s fiction, we begin to perceive that indeed it is not precisely the objective truth he (or the film) is revealing, but his own vision of that truth. As Kate, who later befriends the troubled teenager, explains it to him, David was not everything Alex imagined him to be; he was another being onto whom David projected all the joy and youthful exuberance the 16-year-old felt in his first full enchantment with love. Even through the eyes of a youth, truth is often denied, delusions of what the young imagine and want to happen overwhelming the realities that eventually must be faced.

      If nothing else, however, Alex is a faithful lover, insisting that he is still bound to dance on his lover’s grave. But first he requires real evidence of his death, which he obtains, with the help of Kate, by showing up at the morgue in a dress—stolen out of Ozon’s early short A Summer Dress—as David’s girlfriend, an act which ends in comic disaster. Even when he finds the unmarked grave he spends the first night prostrate with grief, and when he returns a second night to dance, is caught and arrested by the police.

       We now recognize that Alex is not precisely being arrested for causing David’s death, although he personally feels some guilt for that as well. Challenging David’s love after their sail boating party with Kate, David is finally led to admit that he is now bored with their relationship, that Alex’s love for him has become too predictable, without the challenges he loves. As I have written about so very many characters in the LGBTQ films of these pages, David is a man who finds it difficult to commit. Furthermore, we wonder why he even might be expected to be at his young age to focus on one young lover. Love and the desire to possess, from which Alex suffers, are some of the oldest dilemmas facing couples for centuries. In anger, Alex storms out of the Gorman shop, with little hope of reviving the perfect summer he has just experienced.

     In M. Gorman’s delusion, David has raced off after Alex in order to apologize and explain. Perhaps even Alex fears that explanation to be the truth, that in his lover’s rush to find him David was killed. Yet, by the end of this painful film both David and we come to recognize that behind David’s acts lay an insatiable attempt to embrace everything he hadn’t yet experienced or encountered, an almost suicidal thrill of the new and different. Surely, he recognized the dangers that exist in such behavior, which helps to explain his request to celebrate that urge if it might consume him.

      To satisfy normative society, the judges cook up a story about Alex and David fighting jealously over Kate, and, accordingly, justifying Alex’s bizarre behavior after his friend’s death. As in many of Ozon’s works, the normative world wins out over the queer more inclusive one that truly surrounds it.

      By film’s end, however, Alex’s queerness perseveres as, at work in community service for his desecration of the grave, he strikes up a new relationship with the drunken man whose life he and David once save. And the two them sail off for the day in David’s boat, perhaps the only thing he has inherited from his dead lover—except, obviously, for taking up with another chance for love.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 23, 2020).