101 min | NR | June 18, 2021 | Music Box Films
A teenage boy in 1985 Normandy falls hard for the older boy who saves his life in a capsizing. The two spend one perfect summer together. The opening scene tells you it ends at a grave.
Alexis Robin is sixteen and adrift off the Normandy coast when his boat capsizes. David Gorman pulls him from the water and into a borrowed motorcycle, a record shop, and a romance that consumes a single summer. The film opens with Alexis in police custody and tells you a body is involved. François Ozon then rewinds and lets you watch the affair bloom while you already know it ends in death. This is not a mystery about how David dies. It is a study of how a teenager turns first love into an obsession with mortality before he has lived long enough to understand either.
Félix Lefebvre plays Alexis as a watchful kid who narrates his own undoing with the false confidence of someone too young to know better. He holds the camera close and lets you see the exact moment infatuation curdles into something darker. Benjamin Voisin plays David with restless charm and a cruelty that flickers underneath. Voisin makes David magnetic and unknowable, which is the point, because you only ever see him through Alexis. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays Madame Gorman as a grieving widow who collects her dead husband’s customers and her son’s friends with the same hungry warmth. Philippine Velge plays Kate, the English au pair who sees the relationship clearer than either boy.
Ozon adapts Aidan Chambers’s novel “Dance on My Grave” and shoots it on Super 16, which gives the image a grain and warmth that places it inside the period instead of looking back at it. The score leans on The Cure and Rod Stewart’s “Sailing” without ironic distance. Ozon cuts between the summer affair and the police investigation so the two timelines bleed into each other. He stages a key sequence in a nightclub where the editing collapses past and present in a single dance. The production design fills the frame with cassette tapes and walkmans that never tip into nostalgia kitsch.
Ozon has made stranger and sharper films than this one. The grief-and-romance structure is the most conventional thing about it, and the framing device occasionally signals its meaning too plainly. What saves it is the precision of the two leads and the honesty about how adolescence dramatizes its own feelings. Alexis is not mourning David so much as the version of himself that David let him invent. The film knows the difference even when its narrator does not.