As François Oujong's 19th feature film in more than 30 years, Summer '85 could have been his first film. It is adapted from Aiden Chambers' novel La Danse du coucou (The Covenant of Youth) and is also translated as Dancing on My Grave. In 1985, the 18-year-old Ou Rong was touched by the first time he read the novel, hoping to make it his film debut.
"At that time, I was too close to the role and did not have enough distance", Ou Rong once explained in an interview why he realized this film dream more than 30 years later, just when he finished filming the heavier theme of "Thank God", thinking that the next "may be better to make a sunshine youth movie of the same period".
"Summer of '85"
"If you don't want to hear the story of this corpse I know, if you don't want to know what happened between him and me, how he became a corpse, you'd better stop there, this story is not for you." 」 This monologue by the protagonist Alex seems to be a kind of provocative persuasion and a trap of indulgence, and also properly explains the "sunny youth" in Ou Rong's concept.
Although it has been shortlisted for the official section of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, the current rating of the film on IMDB and Douban 6.9 reflects its effectiveness in persuading the audience to withdraw to a certain extent. However, without "persuasion", there is no "Ou Rong".
The film tells the story of two boys on the Normandy waterfront in the middle of the summer of 1985. The film's two threads construct a double narrative time and space: one is the present tense, from the crisis of Alex being prosecuted for destroying the grave; the other is the tragic story of Alex's 6-week, love-hate relationship and eventual yin and yang in the tone of Alex's past tense.
What connects the two time and space is a vow between lovers that if David dies first, Alex will dance in his grave. When vows become proverbs, Alex is telling a fable narrated in the first person. And Alex's own novel is also a hidden narrative space, which is one of Ou Rong's usual techniques, in his previous works "Swimming Pool" and "Entering the House", the novel space and real world created by the protagonist of the film are even difficult to distinguish between true and false.
《Todo Entering》
Many people have compared the much-discussed same-sex movie "Call Me by Your Name" in recent years to "Midsummer of '85", which is actually a far cry. The former is like a summer lover's dream, and the latter is another typical Ou Rong "black fairy tale". The beautiful feelings of the two beautiful teenagers in the film are only short-lived, when David's unexpected death makes all this come to an abrupt end, the film is only halfway through, and the later space is left to the tortuous process of Alex's performance. This is also the typical characteristic of Ou Rong in the film, the beauty of Ou Rong's films has always been used to be broken, and then try to rebuild in a fragment.
The first time I was struck by Euron's film was his Eight Beauty Diagrams, and since then an impression has been ingrained in my mind — the house of the black magic decorated with sweet biscuits and cream. Even after seeing more of his work, the image still lingers. The audiovisual language of Ou Rong's films presents a college-style elegance, and the colors of the pictures are mostly bright, but the content of the packages in them often makes people feel chilling and strange.
"Eight Beautiful Pictures"
In "Summer of '85", the retro tone of 16mm film reproduces the seaside style of France in the 1980s, the youthful face, the exquisitely carved carcass lines of light and shadow, the air is mixed with the roughness of hormones and the subtlety of lovers' hearts... However, all this will be stripped away by the god of death, and "dancing on my grave" is the highlight.
As early as 1988, Ou Rong's silent film study work "Family Portrait", it was starred by Ou Rong's family, telling the story of a cold-blooded teenager who stabbed the whole family and then took a "family portrait". Since then, love and death have become the most common elements in Euron films. In his film world, death is a high-probability event, in addition to death, there is destruction and destruction derived from death. Alex's obsession with the topic of death in "Midsummer of '85" is also a projection of Ou Rong himself.
Family Portrait
And when it comes to love, in Ou Rong's films, love is everywhere and invisible, can bridge everything, and the backhand easily destroys the world, making the story extremely dramatic and metaphorical. This love can transcend age, gender, nationality, race, ethics... In Ou Rong's first feature-length film, "Lost Soul Family", even tried the deadly attraction of cross-species, under the temptation and catalysis of a guinea pig, everyone in the family changed dramatically, which led to a series of tragic and happy stories.
Lost Souls
As a prolific film director, each of Euron's works highlights a unique creative style, and without exception, they are all deeply imprinted on Euron. Until "Midsummer of '85", it was a kind of return and a summary, which Ou Rong himself defined as "dedicated to his adolescent self". According to my understanding, this is like his previous creations to use the writing of characters to build a heavy space, Ou Rong also hides a narrative space in this film, which is sometimes hidden in Alex's perspective, sometimes following David, this space contains Ou Rong's reading of the original novel, but also pinned on his own feelings for the green years, which form an intertext with the content of the film.
For the adolescent love between Alex and David, you may think that this story is a bit sloppy, the elements are a bit complicated, the emotional clues of the characters are also complicated, the pure love that is expected by everyone is actually fragile, and finally you have to join the common male cross-dress bridge in Ou Jong's movies, but all this is constantly reminding you that you are watching a Ou Rong movie.
Alex experienced the disillusionment of love, David once loved him, but also loved freedom, and the possibility of Alex's new love at the end of the film dissolved his obsessive image from beginning to end, and every love was dreamy and real, only because its subject was an imperfect human being.
Ou Rong's film world is complex and multi-meaning, sometimes magic is more convincing than reality, sometimes it is full of emotion, and death is not lacking in humor. Is love a constraint or a freedom? Does love have boundaries and rules? Should man be loyal to desire or morality... Euron was never responsible for throwing out problems and never taking sides personally. Or to put it another way, his film itself is the process of solving complex problems, and the mystery lies in the mind of every audience.
Text | Liang Kun Edited | Chen Kaiyi
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