Remember the final scene of Go Toto! (FID 2017)? Madelene disappears, setting to join the boar piglet she rescued and raised in her house in Vattetot. She makes a surreptitious reappearance at the start of A Beautiful Summer dropping Flora o at her neighbour Simon’s house. Audiences familiar with Pierre Creton’s work
will recognise the filmmaker’s home and garden that, for a summer, have become the stage and set for a new transfiguration of life into comedy. With Flora, youth surges into the house, breathing its formidable energy into the film with a pop music bloom echoed by tracks from The Limiñanas. And there’s the youth of Ahmed and Mohammed, two young migrants washed up in Normandy, to whom Simon and Robert o er a roof, and share their life with. The “children’s” sunny, sensual insouciance and the soundtrack are in contrast to the slower, more serious and challenging mood of the adults. Sophie staves o her loneliness by observing Simon and Robert as they expose their relationship to the risk of Nessim, the African lover who’s survived Calais and the demolition of ‘The Jungle’. Since Life After Death (FID 2004), Creton has turned his home into an echo chamber for
the world, a refuge for an experimental, utopic counter-society of care, humility and gentleness. By taking care of children, adults learn to live with their wounds and their desires; by observing how adults live, children learn to weave together
a fabric of life and death. This fabric has never been as vibrant with nuances and contrasts as A Beautiful Summer, which retains of the eponymous novel by Pavese only its rawness and a lucidity devoid of naïve optimism. With all due respect to the cynics, everything here is true; everything has been experienced, tested before being reinvented for cinema. With no speechifying or slogans, A Beautiful Summer practises the most concrete of policies through the example of a lifestyle, of lives risked in common, in the openness of encounters and adventures. (C.N.)
