Josh Cox | Summer After / 2022

the sequel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Cox (screenwriter and director) Summer After / 2022 [20 minutes]

 

In the one feature film and two short movies Josh Cox has made to date, the Cape Cod-based director is quickly becoming known for making “Love-'em-and-leave-'em” movies. Even more strangely, however, is the fact that this junior filmmaker is already using his “franchise” in the manner of big Hollywood blockbusters, featuring scenes from his 2022 gay film Dino at the Beach in his lesbian film of the same year, Summer After, which itself in a kind of serial continuation of his feature film of 2020, Summer of Mesa.

     Unfortunately, except for the general enthusiasm of the young attendees of the “Queer Film Night” showing of Dino, we have no evidence of the “significance” of the pleasant-enough Dino, and Summer After is a very weak follow-up to his 2020 work, with its central character, 17-year old Mesa (Andrea Granera) basically moping through the landscape as she recalls her special summer of 1986 with an out-of-town girl who left her and returned to New York City, the director flashing before our faces some negatives of his former film as evidence of their grand romance.   

     Indeed, Mesa barely speaks when her best friend Leo (Mateo Correa) is not around, a gay boy who is hoping to hook up with Sam (played by the director himself of course). He succeeds.

     But Mesa seems disinterested in the quite beautiful Emily (Deepti Menon) who has just begun to the work at the cooperative garden in which Mesa has a small plot. Even Leo tries to get her out of her doldrums and to put action into this lame picture by suggesting that Emily is a pretty girl, obviously ready and waiting for a relationship.

    Finally, Mesa half-heartedly attempts to hook up with the quite willing Emily. It begins rather nicely, with the two kissing, the camera spinning around them as the heartbeats of the couple quickly increase their pace. But suddenly Mesa stops, having evidently been reminded by Emily’s comment that leaving someone you love is hard to do, that her former lover did precisely that.

      Mesa determines to get on the next train to New York City is see just how difficult it has been for her summer lover to leave her. But the act, which she herself starts to question as the train pulls in, seems a dangerous and quite reckless one. Cox has not truly established whether these girls are still in regular communication, and what might be the nature of any such communication.  What if Mesa’s special summer was just a pleasant experiment for her lover? What if her lover is now (or perhaps even before) in another relationship? Perhaps her summer lover did not at all find it difficult to leave Cape Cod. Mesa is throwing nearly everything away, her close friendship with Leo and her budding relationship with Emily, simply out of sentiment for an event in the past.

     That’s what lovers do, I guess. It appears now Cox at least will have the opportunity to continue with his sequels, further advertising something which was not so very memorable to his audiences in the first place.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2023

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).