August 8, 2021
François Ozon Reveals What Went into Gay Romance Flick 'Summer of 85'
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Two teenage boys embark on a summer romance that's tinged from the start with the specter of loss: One of them exacts a promise that the other will dance on his grave. Who but French auteur François Ozon could make a fun, frolicsome film that fulfills the all the erotic and existential promise of such a story?
"Summer of 85" tells the story of David (Benjamin Voisin) and Alex (Félix Lefebvre), two very different young men. David is a little older, sexually experienced, and eager to grasp all that life offers him. Alex is 16 and inexperienced; a budding writer, he thirsts to learn everything David has to teach him. What Alex doesn't realize until later is that bliss and ecstasy can also entail grief and loss –�a lesson David has already learned, with the death of his father a year earlier.
Ozon's newest film, "Summer of 85" is a "Call Be by Your Name" for the Normandy region of France, with its blend of Euro-nostalgia, sexual chemistry, intense emotion, and '80s pop music. Not that he minds: "I love that film, too," Ozon told EDGE, before adding, "I think they are very different visions."
What they have in common, though, is a recollection of youthful sexual awakening before the terror of the global AIDS pandemic, a tragedy, Ozon notes, that "destroyed the lives of so many gay people, and straight people, too.
"It's a way to go back to this time before," the filmmaker adds of his movie, a cinematic adaption of a YA novel he read as a teen and determined, even then, that he would bring it to the screen one day. The pre-AIDS era, Ozon adds, "can seem like a paradise" to us now.
The cherubic Alex –�he "arrives like an angel" in the lives of David and his mother, Ozon notes – finds his own paradise is lost when tragedy strikes; the romance and heartbreak at the core of the story is bracketed by a procedural in which we learn the details of the tragedy, and explore the connections between Alex's naiveté and his possible guilt.
For more on what made the story memorable enough that François Ozon would keep to his dream and make the story into a film 35 years after first reading it, and to find out about the chemistry between the film's two gorgeous leads, read the complete EDGE interview.
