By Katherine Connell

Cinema about sex is often enriched by summer settings: escalating heat can place bodies into increasingly erotic orbits as the seeming eternity of canicular days are pit against seasonal ephemerality. While fleeting yet formative attachments are the nucleus of countless films that centre sexual self-discovery, considerably underexplored are the unenticing experiences of sexual alienation and turmoil during the warmest time of year. The title of Québec filmmaker Denis Côté’s most recent feature, Un été comme ça, suggests the generic frothiness of a hot fling, but turns on this conceit to delve into the highly specific experiences of three women in a remote treatment program for hypersexuality and sexual trauma.

Across Côté’s varied career is a recurrent fascination with isolated characters who act in perplexing, unexplained ways and resist being known. Whereas geographically isolated, close-knit rural communities stoke tension in Curling (2010) and Répertoire des villes disparues (2019), Côté’s chasmic spaces are also inhabited by social outcasts and misunderstood subjects, such as the recently incarcerated queer couple of Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (2013), the mysteriously withdrawn wife in Boris sans Béatrice (2016), and the solitary wanderer of Wilcox (2019). These cryptic if subtly rebellious protagonists form the connective tissue of a filmography that probes the dynamics that erupt from the refusal of normative social structures like marriage, domesticity, wellness, and community. Its unsurprising, then, that Côté’s previous feature, Hygiène sociale (2021), slyly references the moralizing and repressive Progressive-era sexual education movement of the same name. Yet while Hygiène sociale raised interesting questions about sex and gender, its provocations—delivered between characters standing at a distance in a field—were buried in a formal experiment that often felt like endurance art.

As if closing the distance that Hygiène sociale opened up, Un été comme ça returns to the smaller-scale intimacies of Côté’s previous narrative features. Léonie (Larissa Corriveau), Eugénie (Laure Giappiconi), and Gaëlle—nicknamed Geisha (Aude Mathieu)—are the adult participants in a two-year-old experimental “recovery” program hosted at a bucolic lakeside cabin. Any underlying therapeutic philosophy behind the process—a co-funded project between unnamed universities in Montréal and Düsseldorf—is left aggressively vague. Its architect, Mathilde (Marie-Claude Guérin), who is either a research psychiatrist or psychologist, appears briefly to introduce the program as “a journey, not a treatment,” and frames the experience as a vacation from mental hardship. The ferocity with which she demands that precocious Geisha take her feet off the couch, however, exposes an uncomfortable edge beneath this veneer of relaxation. Adding surveillance to the agenda are supervising social worker Sami (Samir Guesmi) and German psychologist Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle). Unconventionally, alcohol is permitted, as is a 24-hour leave partway through the 26-day program. Requests from the participants for clarification only produce more ambiguity: “Why 26 days? Thirty is too long, and 23 not enough?” inquires Geisha, whose question is repeated as a statement.

That 26-day duration provides the film with a loose narrative structure, so that its series of largely disconnected interactions drifts towards the climactic event of the participants’ 24-hour leave. Their sudden independence to pursue sexual compulsions gives way to tense, potentially dangerous encounters, though the presence of subtle, newly formed inhibitions indicates that the subjects are inching towards self-compassionate assertion. Just as these scenes appear as the familiar vertex of a parabolic recovery arc, the film’s denouement is much the same as its first half: time passes without any transformational impact. Though this narrative obfuscation may seem withholding, it facilitates Côté’s exploration of the film’s core interest in the cohabitation of strangers who share similarly potent experiences. Thankfully absent are the standard-fare group therapy sessions which often unnaturally expedite intimacy in films of this ilk; instead, the trio develops mutual recognition, respect, and camaraderie through simply sharing space—sitting next to one another during meals, inhabiting neighbouring rooms, sunbathing on the lawn, hiking, or swimming in the lake.

Côté’s refusal to root this fictional program in legible theories or practices effectively sidesteps the clunkiness with which the therapist–client relationship is typically represented onscreen. As authority figures, Octavia and Sami are completely inscrutable in their intentions. Sami’s introductory greeting to the group—“I like people”—reads as equally authentic and smarmy, especially when he claims he’s “not a narc.” Although he asks for consent before entering the participants’ rooms and offers a compassionate ear, he also hovers in doorframes and listens to them loudly masturbate. Meanwhile, Octavia—an experienced academic psychologist—maintains a clinical, professional distance until the film’s final moments, when she makes a shockingly flirtatious transgression with Eugénie. The pair’s threadbare character development means that they act as ciphers for the film’s broader questions about the thin membrane between observation and voyeurism (a dynamic that is also embodied by its audience). While neither Octavia nor Sami embody the trope of the predatory therapist, the idea that they might be aroused by interactions with their hypersexual clients points towards a filmmaker contemplating the exploitative histories of both social work and therapy.

From this angle, it’s somewhat ironic that accusations of fetishism troubled the reception of Un été comme ça at the Berlinale. Some of its images are status-quo gaze-y, but its more memorable compositions are indirect, such as when members of a soccer team disappear behind a bush to have sex with Geisha, or a close-up of the back of Leonie’s head as she watches porn, accompanied by the scratchy excess sound emitted by a pair of earphones. Although the film mostly deflects the stylized superficiality with which much contemporary arthouse cinema approaches non-normative sexual expression, it does seem that Côté can’t avoid certain predictable indulgences, namely in sketching too simplistic a connection between kink and trauma: Léonie, who discloses the impact of childhood sexual abuse on her adult sexuality quite early on in the film, is addicted to streaming gangbang videos on her phone and practises BDSM (shibari, electrostimulation, suspension) during her weekend leave. While a lack of contextual development allows the therapists to function as symbolical figures, the same approach applied to the film’s protagonists threatens to reduce the complexities that make them compelling.

Ultimately, Un été comme ça oscillates between a view of sexuality as simultaneously banal and extraordinary. Despite its gaps, the film is enriched by a profound respect and tenderness towards its central characters, which is underscored by an impactful final scene that also echoes Côté’s predilection for crafting unsettling images. As the girls prepare to depart the program on their 26th day, they run with jubilant energy towards the lake for a final swim. A highly mobile tracking shot chases their motion as they kick off their shoes and, without a moment’s pause, leap off the end of a long dock in different directions. Against our expectations for the reassuringly baptismal image of their resurfacing, they simply vanish. For all of its ambiguities, this newly empty frame is highly satisfying: our observational privileges and intrusions have come to a close. No longer bound to the narrative nor contained within its spaces, these women enter something deeper and unknown.

Originally published in Cinema Scope Online