9 Films for the End of Summer
The ones worth saving for the last week of August, when the light goes long and everything starts packing itself away.
There is a specific kind of film about the end of summer, and it is not really about summer at all. It is about the afternoon the shutters get closed, the argument that surfaces on the last night, the person who was there in July and is not there in September. These nine understand it.
1. Le Rayon Vert (Éric Rohmer, 1986)
Delphine's August collapses in the first ten minutes: the friend she was travelling with cancels, and she is left with a month off and nowhere to be. She goes to Cherbourg, then the Alps, then Biarritz, and is miserable in all three. Rohmer worked with a tiny crew and largely improvised dialogue, which is why it holds the particular humiliation of a holiday that is not working. The last shot is a sunset. Wait for it.
2. Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
Adapted from Françoise Sagan, and built around the gap between one summer and the winter that follows: Paris is black and white, the Riviera is colour. Cécile is seventeen, cropped and sunburnt, and spends the season on the coast with her father and a rotating cast of his companions until she does something she cannot undo. Jean Seberg's haircut launched a decade. The film is colder than its reputation.
3. Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962)
Rome over Ferragosto, emptied out - Risi shot in a genuinely deserted city, everybody already gone to the coast. Vittorio Gassman's Bruno picks up a shy law student, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and drives him to the Tuscan coast over two days on the promise of lunch. It is very funny for a long time. It is the film Italians invoke in mid-August, and the ending is why.
4. La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969)
A villa above Saint-Tropez, a pool, four people, and roughly forty minutes before anyone says anything that matters. Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had ended their engagement six years earlier, which is doing a great deal of work on screen. Jane Birkin arrives in the second act. Nothing in the film is quite as good as the first shot of the terrace, and that is not a criticism.
5. The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971)
Norfolk, the summer of 1900, and a twelve-year-old carrying letters between Julie Christie and Alan Bates without understanding what he is carrying. Pinter wrote it. There is a thermometer on the wall of the house that the film keeps returning to, and the heat builds against it until the final act. Palme d'Or, 1971.
6. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)
Three siblings, their mother's house outside Paris, and the question of what happens to a Corot, a Majorelle desk and a set of Degas plaster casts when none of them wants to keep the house. The Musée d'Orsay co-produced and lent real pieces to the shoot, which shows. The last scene is a party thrown by the teenage granddaughter in the emptied rooms, and it is the least sentimental thing in it.
7. A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)
La Piscine again, moved to Pantelleria and turned up. Tilda Swinton plays a rock star recovering from throat surgery and barely speaks; Ralph Fiennes talks enough for both of them and does the dancing to Emotional Rescue that everybody remembers. The house - dammuso walls, deep window reveals, a pool cut into the terrace - is reason enough to watch it twice.
8. Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
Two seventeen-year-olds and a woman a decade older drive to a beach that may not exist. Cuarón drops the sound at intervals so a narrator can tell you things the characters will never learn, including how each of them ends up. The final scene takes place months later, in a café, back in the city, and it is colder than anything preceding it.
9. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)
A father and daughter at a Turkish resort in the late nineties, filmed partly on the camcorder she is holding. Almost nothing happens: a pool, a karaoke night, a rug bought at a market they cannot really afford. Wells withholds so much that the film assembles itself afterwards, usually somewhere around the drive home. Save this one for the very end, or possibly for October.
