Sum­mer­time

France in the ear­ly ​’70s: lib­er­al­ly-mind­ed coun­try girl Del­phine (Izïa Higelin) heads off to Paris to seek her for­tune and falls in with a hard­core, mil­i­tant women’s lib group. She’s over­whelmed by their mox­ie and pas­sion, but has tak­en a par­tic­u­lar shine towards top boss Car­ole (Cécile De France). She joins the group in their fem­i­nist cru­sade (“We’re not anti men, we’re pro women!”), becom­ing instru­men­tal in break­ing a young gay guy out of a men­tal insti­tute who has been interred against his will (essen­tial­ly to cure him). And then, a mis­un­der­stand­ing, a deep soul­ful glance, the brush­ing of skin, a stolen kiss, a love affair… But Del­phine is called back to the coun­try, where her lifestyle choic­es are not mere­ly frowned upon, but pos­i­tive­ly disallowed.

Cather­ine Corsini’s film is an ami­able French romp with no real ambi­tion, but it trots out the tried-and-test­ed for­mu­la with sat­is­fy­ing com­mit­ment and sin­cer­i­ty. It’s a sil­ly film which takes itself very seri­ous­ly, and maybe that’s part of what makes it work as well as it does. The sto­ry is con­struct­ed with the sole pur­pose of reach­ing a point of high dra­ma – con­trivances be damned. Del­phine and Car­ole are forced to hide their love from the unen­light­ened rubes, and they are helped by the fact that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is so taboo in the provinces, that no-one even stops to ques­tion why these two touchy-feely women spend so much time togeth­er, often frol­ick­ing naked in the fields.

Noémie Lvovsky plays the moth­er whose staunch­ly tra­di­tion­al beliefs can­not be over­turned, even though she takes a great lik­ing to Car­ole, who in turn helps the demure old bat come out of her shell. The film falls apart in its final act because it embraces weepy melo­dra­ma over basic log­ic so whole-heart­ed­ly, that it fails to hit the emo­tion­al peaks its aim­ing for. Yet Corsi­ni man­ages to make a dime­store romance appear as some­thing more polit­i­cal­ly and social­ly astute, even if those ele­ments of the sto­ry end up being pure­ly cos­met­ic. It cer­tain­ly does prove one thing: the French do still pro­duce some great cheese.