Review: Summertime

Summertime (15)

France/Belgium 2015  105 mins  Subtitles Dir: Catherine Corsini  Cast: Cécile de France, Izïa Higelin, Noémie Lvovsky, Jean-Henri Compère, Kévin Azaïs, Benjamin Bellecour

Catherine Corsini’s period lesbian feminist romance boasts more than its fair share of structural awkwardness, but a brace of committed, engaging performances manage to hold things together whenever it starts to get wobbly.

It’s 1971 and strapping, capable, tractor-driving young Delphine (Higelin) is working on the family farm in the idyllic French countryside near Limoges. Her father Maurice (Compère) frets that she’s yet to snare a man and wonders whether she’ll ever cop off with doting childhood friend Antoine (Azais). What neither he nor her mother Monique (Lvovsky) suspect is that she’s been enjoying a clandestine affair with a local girl. But now her lover announces that she’s off to get married and, furthermore, their relationship didn’t mean anything anyway. Abruptly, broken-hearted Delphine pitches up in Paris. The feminist equivalent of a hetero romcom ‘meet cute’ ensues when she encounters a band of spirited women’s libbers engaged in the revolutionary act of pinching chaps’ arses on the street and rescues one of them from an irate male chauvinist who’s bent on avenging his wounded dignity. This turns out to be statuesque reproductive rights activist and teacher Carole (de France), who’s a decade older and much more politically enlightened. Before long, Delphine has joined Carole’s women’s group and is enjoying such jolly japes as pelting an anti-abortionist and – in a bizarre, almost comical interlude – busting a gay man out of an asylum where his ‘treatment’ for homosexuality has left him a wheelchair-bound zombie.

In a neat inversion of expectations that Summertime could have done with rather more of, it’s Delphine who makes the first move, shocking the more worldly Carole into questioning her sexuality. She’s in a straight relationship with an earnest, beardy socialist fellow (Bellecour), who doesn’t appear to be entirely on board with the whole feminist thing. Before long, he’s got the hump and the women are cavorting unselfconsciously in Delphine’s cramped garret. In order to nudge the narrative along a bit, Corsini then has Delphine receive a telegram summoning her home because her father has had a stroke. Now it’s Carole’s turn for a culture shock as she scurries off to the conservative countryside in hot pursuit of her lover.

Corsini doesn’t seem especially interested in politics, which is probably just as well as her film is at its clunkiest and most cartoonish when it attempts to engage with revolutionary sloganeering. Much more impressive is the entirely natural and persuasive passionate central relationship, which takes centre stage in the second half and is beautifully played by veteran Cécile de France and relative newcomer Izïa Higelin. Indeed, Summertime certainly delivers on the promise of uninhibited, authentically hairy ’70s naked ladies taking al fresco Sapphic tumbles bathed in a golden summery glow. But while Corsini is clearly alert to the danger of presenting a preposterous fantasy of acceptance in a reactionary community, she seems unsure of how to deliver a satisfactory conclusion, opting instead for a coda that aims to square the circle but just feels tacked-on and unconvincing.