Un été brûlant (2011) - film review

Paul met Frédéric, an artist, through a mutual friend.  He lives with Angèle, an actress who makes films in Italy.  Whilst waiting for his big break as an actor, Paul works as an extra.  This is how he comes to meet Elisabeth, another aspiring actress.  In no time at all, the two are deeply in love.  When Frédéric invites them to join him in Rome, Paul and Elisabeth accept readily, little knowing what traumas lie ahead...

Philippe Garrel's latest assorted musings on the impossibility of attaining that elusive amour parfait represent not so much a throwback to the heady days of the French New Wave as a morbid self-immersion in the preoccupations of 1960s youth culture, as channelled through the slightly warped sensibilities of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache and Jacques Rivette.   Un été brûlant is proof conclusive that Garrel is trapped in a time-warp, if not a time-loop, slavishly rehashing a style of cinema which the nouvelle vague directors had themselves abandoned by the early 1970s.  After a decade in which he felt impelled to stick with the grainy black-and-white look that somehow came to epitomise modernity in French cinema of the 1960s, Garrel finally deigns to return to colour, not the pristine high resolution colour today’s cinema audiences are used to, but the saturated, slightly washed out colour that his New Wave predecessors gravitated to once they had a little bit more money in their pockets.  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but you can over-do it...

Long before Un été brûlant had its first screening, it aroused considerable interest on account of a reputedly outré nude scene involving the actress Monica Bellucci.  Needless to say, the film didn’t live up these prurient expectations and the much-vaunted nude scene - a direct rip-off of the one featuring Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) - is not much to write home about.  The same can almost be said of the performances, which do little to enliven Garrel’s plodding narrative and struggle to hold our interest.  The director once again casts his son Louis as the Bohemian lover, a part that certainly suits him but which offers him little scope to demonstrate his range as an actor.  In spite of the fact that she gave birth just a few months before making the film, Bellucci is as ravishingly beautiful as ever, but again she is saddled with a dated archetype (the self-centred muse) which does her few favours.  The more interesting characters in this ironic meditation on the limitations of free love were given to the less experienced Céline Sallette and Jérôme Robart, who both fail to make much of the golden opportunity that Garrel offers them.

Un été brûlant is something of a curate’s egg.  For those who regard the French New Wave as the greatest thing that happened to French cinema, it is a film with an irresistible allure - languorously slow, subtly sensual, methodically intellectual and periodically brilliant in its stylisation and pointed reflections on life.  The flashback narrative structure (another dated motif) works surprisingly well and helps to conceal some weaknesses in the plot and the characterisation.  The references to the French New Wave classics, in particular Godard’s Le Mépris and Eustache’s epic La Maman et la putain (1973), are easily spotted - Garrel has no shame when it comes to stealing from the masters - but these are ingeniously exploited to expose the truth that lurks beneath the surface, the desires which can never be satisfied, the futility of any quest for the absolute, be it in art or in love.   As a respectful homage to the French New Wave, the film has much to commend it, although as a work of cinema in its own right it is singularly lacking, both in substance and originality.  Perhaps it is time for Philippe Garrel to leave his cosy 1960s time bubble and join us in the 21st century, to tackle subjects which are more relevant to a contemporary audience and which will have something of the resonance and bite of his earliest endeavours, instead of leaving us with an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu...

© James Travers 2011

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