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Un jour d'été (French) [A Summer Day]

It is odd that this film is being promoted as a gay film. There is an unresolved subtle and all- but-avoided ambiguity around the lead Sebastian, but it's more of a tease than anything substantial and i wonder who exactly it is in there for ?

Sebastian and Mikhael are best friends in a small town. They spend their times together. Seb works in his father's garage. One night when Seb watches Mikhael making out with a girl in the woods, he is hurt. The next 2 days , he doesn't talk to his friend. One day during a football match, Mikhael while hanging on the goal post gets injured and dies. Enter the mayor of the town in the scene who is the subject of suspicion. The town's mayor must face the fact of his office's possible culpability. His son Francis wants to be friends with Seb (I got the feeling that he had soft corner for Seb) and tries to get closer to him now that Mikhael is dead. Also in the scene is Mikhael's mother, who has already lost a husband, must now come to terms with her grief. The film basically follows Seb and the mayor. The mayor is someone who is soon to undergo a life trial involving an unexpected death. Seb is someone who has to deal with loss of a friend and make amendments with life and also become close to Mikhael's family.

The film was slow and a lot of emotions in the film were left to be felt and imagined by the viewer. This kind of direction comes in very impressive in most situations but in others it just falls flat because some actions of the individuals are not justified. The "gay" angle is subtly understated. Seb's loneliness is palpable, and he has trouble reaching out to others and sharing what is in his heart. The good part of the film is when Seb is trying to make for his loss of not being with Mikhael by trying to be loving to the girl he was fooling with, his mother and also his sister

It takes time to get used to the film. On afterthoughts, you will like it. (5.5/10)

Comments

frenchiedoc said…
The plot seeps in the French idiom of a first, emerging, homoerotic love. Opening scene shows Seb's intense taking in, and longing for Mik, his secret 'pote', his bosses son: his silent craving for his friend's lithe body, for his love, for his attention, the subtle sensuality of half-naked adolescent bodies, idealized beauty, the intense gaze in Seb's eyes in lust for Mik: Sib is jealous of the tenderness Mik displays towards a vulnerable rabbit, stroking and pulling the passive animal towards his sweaty body: Seb longs to be that animal in Mik's arms. 'Hold me', Sib's eyes ask. With that rare, naïve, adolescent sexual, sweaty intensity, his erection oozing, is shattered by Mik's senseless killing of the animal for sport: body, erection, lust, and longing go limp. Next Seb sees Mik make-out with une petite amie, yields angry, murderous jealousy, crushes Seb's tender spirit. Mik dies in a sports accident: Seb is guilt-laden, his Romeo dead before coition, yet cannot tell anyone of his secret, lost love.

The characters all desire Seb now he is alone and in mourning: all desire to fill his tender void, to bed him, to poses him and drown in his quiet grief: he will have none of them. An adoring male suitor touches Seb's bleeding hand and heart, strokes, tries to soothe Seb's pain, stains Seb's heart with his paint gun, Seb rages: I don't want you, I want Mik.

A first love: In Seb one sees the purity, fragility of a heart untouched of love, now lusts for his first love, an intense homoerotic longing, as Euryalus, for his Nisus......
Golu said…
Damn!! What a beautiful write-up. It brought back flashbacks from the movie. I just love it when I hear all kinds of viewpoints and it makes my personal movie watching experience even more enriched.

You are a good writer.. my friend
frenchiedoc said…
Golu, thanks for your affectionate words, "You are a good (lover) my friend" I accept your responsive hand and heart reaching out to me, that in your movie-watching of this love story, enhanced your endowement, now engorged once again by the pheremones in my plea: thank you for reaching out to stroke my flaccid, Seb-like plea for the kitten-soft attention, parallel to that which Seb's vulnerable, fragile frame seeks: having lost my own first love, nutured, breast and heart-fed, requited, but unconsummated. Understand, my comment is inspired by my own moody lust for the life and love and nuanced interaction in that French mode de vie in the film I have never had: born into an Anglo Saxon world, the luxury of the pouty, un-saids, un-felts, un-stroked cries only absorbed in the unique frequency of that Gaulish pre-emission...I feel, fantasize, dream, lust and long for that French tutor, uncut as he may be: are you he? As the Little Prince on his planet, me on my little French island, an emmigré in the middle of Paris, seek taming: Rapunsel-like, I let down my hair for you to pull up to my nest. j'arrive Paris le jour de sueur, le 1 mai, 09.82.28.32.74
frenchiedoc said…
A bridge, a link, an emotion never felt with such intensity: when Seb sees Mik's intense, seductive, emotional-laden, strokes on the purring rabbit, spurt, turn to atavistic, murderous rage, battering the animal's brains against the unfeeling tree, Seb feeling an Appolo-inspired rage against Tiresias, a love-sourced murderous rage, flays the beast, Seb fuses, for his first love, the unnatural, magnetic vise in the trope of feelings: love, lust, hate, murder, jealous possession, fusion...finality, the ultimate orgasm in the spiral of death: the dissolution of self and other at the moment, and in the fluid of orgasm...my own erection, already in Seb's slip, we cum without will or wish.

I felt this myself, the only once in my life: 17, beardless as any virgin, sweaty, Greek gym-youth, in an adjacent bed, when Fleck took my hand to his bed and kissed the back of my hand, no Bosch, no Marquis, no Faust nor his Gounod, could have prepred me for that instant when, taking his hand to my cheek, touched Fleck's eager thrust, cheek to skin, my existence was subsumed into an intense ejaculation that Buber taught me to await that moment of I-Thou, if G-D exists it is now or ever: Seb brought all that to me in a flash, a flush, a fusion, an ejaculation so spastic an epileptic would be envious, I slipped into sleep.

A frustrated, horny post questioned what this film had to do with gay love, clearly do not date this this guy.
Golu said…
I dont know what to say :blush: :)
you are really really good with words

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