Summer Things
Two couple of friends, one very rich, the other almost homeless, decide to go on Holiday. Julie, a single mother, joins them too. Once at seaside, it starts a complicate love cross among them that will involve also a transsexual, a jealous brother, a Latin Lover and another nervous stressed couple. Not to mention about the daughter of one of them that is secretly in Chicago with one of her father's employees... At the end of the summer, all of them will join the same party...
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- Cast:
- Charlotte Rampling , Jacques Dutronc , Lou Doillon , Sami Bouajila , Karin Viard , Vincent Elbaz , Denis Podalydès
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Reviews
That was an excellent one.
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
This started fairly well and looked like it would be very amusing and for some I know it is. For me though, the characters begin to get rather irritating and by the end really annoying. It seems incomprehensible that any of them would carry on the way they do. 'Carry On', is just about the right expression, too. Director Blanc, who plays the excruciating fat man who thinks his middle aged wife is off with everybody, waffles away in the accompanying 'featurette', seemingly unaware that he has produced something akin to the infamous English series and thinks he's Eisenstein instead. Yes, pretentious is another word that comes to mind, and even if this is based upon an English book and has some elements of the worst of this country's yob/snobby business it is in the end a very French movie. We may overrate our silly soap operas but only the French would consider them 'significant'.
A gaggle of unpleasant city dwellers descend on Le Touquet for a week's holiday. Stories intertwine, characters fight, make friends, deceive each other, have sex...Blanc has gathered together a stellar cast for his adaptation of Connolly's book, but to little avail. What should be hilarious is instead at turns tedious and irritating. All the characters are either pathetic or unpleasant or both, and in the end, despite the farcical nature of things, this viewer was left caring little about what happens to any of them.Credit to the always wonderful Rampling, plus Bouquet and Viard but that's it. And Dutronc looks like he's rather overdone the nips and tucks, if you ask me...
This is one of those superficial little French comedies that finesses its way through numerous sexual liaisons and adulteries with the tolerance only the French seem to have for such things. It's actually quite amusing in an if-I-didn't-have-to-break-a-leg-to-see-it kind of way and going to see an inoffensive film with subtitles makes you look sophisticated (though this may be reduced if you see it in a popcorn munching multiplex).
Those of us who like French cinema do so because, more often than not, the French display subtlety and skill in creating all sorts of different kinds of movies- light and heavy, political and whimsical. This is not one of them. In fact, other than the rampant, unapologetic sexuality, this could have been an American movie, and though I do like American movies, this is not meant as a complement. If you want a better French movie of this genre, try "The Taste of Others" or "Same Old Song"