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Genre: Drama
Director: Philippe Garrel
· Cast: Monica Bellucci, Louis Garrel,Celine Sallette,
Not long after Philippe Garrel’s languid, emotionally raw film “A Burning Hot Summer” opens, its lonely beauty, Frédéric (Louis Garrel, the director’s son), dies. He’s first seen standing next to his BMW at a gas station, taking pulls from a flask, his hair and clothes disheveled. He looks more distracted than disturbed, but a few beats later, when he’s speeding behind the wheel down a dark highway, you see that his eyes are glassy.
An abrupt cut to a naked woman, lying across an electric-blue cloth and mutely gesturing toward the camera, implies a reason for his tears. But it doesn’t prepare you for when he closes his moist eyes — as if to blot out her image — and crashes. This shock is followed by another: “Frédéric is dead,” the voice of his friend Paul (Jérôme Robart), announces against a black screen. This void soon fills, at least visually, with characters, conversations and complications that can seem random but gather in force.
Philippe Garrel, whose films include “Regular Lovers” (set against the turmoil of France in May 1968) and “Frontier of Dawn” (a love story involving one man and two women), creates worlds that spring from a poetic, deeply personal sense of life rather than a screenwriting manual. People find and lose love, make up or don’t. They pass the time, time passes them by. In “A Burning Hot Summer” (a pulpy title that sounds better in the original, “Un Été Brûlant), two men fall into friendship, and while little happens, everything is at stake.
Frédéric’s life is conspicuously on the line, although it takes the entirety of the film to grasp why and how he ended up cracking up on a dark road. This gives “A Burning Hot Summer” the superficial aspect of a mystery, even if its deeper enigmas turn on secrets of the heart. Even so, the accident hangs over the film and suggests a narrative motivation that isn’t always self-evident.
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