Sum­mer (Leto) – first look review

It doesn’t feel good to kick a film by a man cur­rent­ly under house arrest in Rus­sia. Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov, a cre­ative renais­sance man known for his work in the­atre as well as film direct­ing, was arrest­ed on 22 August 2017 from the set of Leto in St Peters­berg. He was tak­en to Moscow, where a judge sen­tenced him to house arrest where he remains at time of writ­ing, despite the Cannes Film Festival’s best efforts to inter­vene. Aside: We would love to see a doc­u­men­tary cov­er­ing how this went down, the world’s pre­mière art­house film fes­ti­val nego­ti­at­ing with the Russ­ian administration…

As unjust as Serebrennikov’s sit­u­a­tion may be, it – alas – offers no rea­son to view his film Leto through rose-tint­ed glass­es – and not just because pink has no place in its hand­some black-and-white aes­thet­ic. With no per­cep­ti­ble nar­ra­tive frame, this two-hour mean­der through the under­ground of rock rem­i­nis­cence seem to last as long as the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the title, that is to say, as long as summer.

Leto begins at a rock con­cert in 1980s Leningrad which is such a hot tick­et that fans have to sneak in past zeal­ous guards. Singer/​guitarist Mike (Roman Bilyk) is at the cen­tre of it all, wear­ing shag­gy hair, sun­glass­es and very un-rock-n-roll sense of con­tent. Two women in the audi­ence defy the secu­ri­ty by hold­ing up a heart sign. One of them, it turns out, is Mike’s girl­friend Natasha (Iri­na Starshen­baum). In what proves to be the one and only nar­ra­tive devel­op­ment of the film, Mike, Natasha and their blissed-out coterie of under­ground pals organ­ise a beach par­ty where they meet new rock hope­ful, Vik­tor (Teo Yoo), who impress­es Mike with his tal­ent while also catch­ing the eye of Natasha.

From here on it, Leto is pure­ly a hang-out movie set around a bor­ing, low-stakes love tri­an­gle. All the char­ac­ters are too chill to give a damn about one anoth­er. As long as they can choose whether Lou Reed or T‑Rex goes on the turntable, they’re hap­py. Con­ver­sa­tions and his­tor­i­cal con­text allow us know that these peo­ple are coun­ter­cul­tur­al rebels, going their own way in the face of the oppres­sive spec­tre of Sovi­et Com­mu­nism. How­ev­er, short of one Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud style exchange, this abstract spec­tre has no mate­r­i­al bear­ing on the film. With no sense of an oppo­si­tion, there is no dra­ma and no mean­ing derived from watch­ing these mel­low music lovers just doing their thang.

There are one or two sequences which threat­en to cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion, large­ly thanks to the tex­tured images cap­tured by MVP cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Vladislav Opulyants, and the endur­ing pow­er of the rock’n’roll giants on the sound­track (Everyone’s there, from Bowie to Dylan to Blondie) yet even those moments don’t tru­ly take-off. The audio ref­er­ences are super­fi­cial nods, not hearty tributes.

There is noth­ing offen­sive about Leto, unless you take offence at the prospect of inter­minable bore­dom. What is offen­sive, how­ev­er, is the con­text in which it has been giv­en its first air­ing. Giv­en the furore about the lack of female film­mak­ers in main Com­pe­ti­tion slots, and the festival’s stat­ed desire to address this, it is bizarre, baf­fling and infu­ri­at­ing that a film of such ephemer­al vague­ness has received its world pre­mière in this way.

Many Cannes atten­dees are aware that the most vital films are often pro­grammed in the side­bars, yet the Palme d’Or is still held aloft as the ulti­mate auteur­ial recog­ni­tion: a cinephile Oscar, if you will. Leto is just one more small symp­tom, on a chart of big­ger aches and pains, regard­ing the need to avoid buy­ing into the festival’s self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry taste, and pay atten­tion to the val­ue sys­tem at play here.