Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Summer of 85
2020 · François Ozon · Summer of 85 on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for when the music becomes only one boy's headphones. (sound)
In the nightclub the mix collapses from the room's music down to what Alexis alone hears on his Walkman, while the dancing around him keeps going.
Payoff: Sound stops being a record of the room and becomes a record of one boy's private feeling. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: once sound stops confirming the room, you are hearing only what Alexis is feeling.
Notice how close and low the camera stays to the boys. (camera)
Alaouié shoots handheld at shoulder height, cropping the frame down to necks, hands, and the backs of heads rather than giving you a full, composed view of either boy.
Payoff: You get fragments of a body, the way a memory keeps pieces instead of a whole picture.
Notice you almost never see David without Alexis watching him. (staging)
David is always in motion, addressing a room, being looked at by more than one person, and Alexis is always the one doing the looking.
Payoff: You are never shown David alone, only the version of him Alexis is constructing as he watches.
Notice the film tells you at the start there is a corpse. (structure)
Alexis is writing this account for a court and a social worker, not remembering it freely for you, and the film keeps cutting between the summer and that interrogation.
Payoff: Every warm scene you watch is already being shaped by someone with a reason to shape it a certain way.
Once you have seen it
Look for one shot of David that Alexis could not have seen. (structure)
On a second viewing, check every scene David appears in without Alexis. There isn't one. Every image of him passes through what Alexis witnessed or imagined.
Payoff: David the character may be less real than David the boy Alexis actually knew, and the film never corrects this. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls Alexis a forger, someone who makes a version of the truth rather than reporting one that already exists.
Watch what Alexis does at the mortuary and at the grave. (staging)
Locked out of the funeral and the family's grief, he improvises two acts of mourning on his own: a disguised visit to the body and, later, the dance the two of them once promised.
Payoff: Both acts are transgressive and childlike at once, the only mourning available to a boy the adults have shut out. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest, a posture that exposes a whole condition: a mourner with no permitted place to grieve.
Carry this in: You are reading Alexis's testimony, not watching events directly. Ask what a boy under pressure would leave out.