Summertime film review ★★★★★

Summertime begins with a piece of misdirection. The setting is the rural centre of France where two young women meet in the cool dark of an evening. It’s an exchange laden with history, but it’s a history that remains obscured. You expect the film to skip backwards in time – to track the course of this relationship – but instead it jumps forwards.

One of the young women disappears from the story, scarcely to be mentioned again. The other, Delphine (Izïa Higelin), goes to Paris where she finds herself at the heart of the ‘70s Women’s Liberation Movement. Here she meets Carole (Cécile de France), a free-spirited Spanish teacher who at one point takes to the balcony naked, proclaiming ‘death to bourgeois society!’ The pair’s chemistry is undeniable from the start, and they soon fall passionately in love.

But the utopia which they create for themselves soon comes under threat. As Delphine’s father falls ill, she decides to return home to help run the family farm. Unable to live apart, Carole accompanies Delphine; to give up the smoke-filled rooms of progressive Paris for open fields and closed minds. The tonal shift works well. Paris is all intensity and dizzying heights; the countryside, more melancholy, even for all its beauty.

It’s the story of a relationship assailed by prejudice, and of two ways of coping with that bigotry. Delphine is more cautious, trying to stave off conflict; Carole is more forthright. Higelin and de France and play their parts to perfection, crafting rounded characters, both fighting to define their own roles.

There are times when the script lets them down; at one point, Delphine enters into a laboured soliloquy about the quality of the soil in her hometown. As metaphors go, it’s not the finest. Still, when a story is this poignant and well-told, it hardly matters.