Cinemas and studios don’t like summer. It’s the season when their audiences fall away. Even film buffs prefer lazing at the lido or under azure skies to spending hours in darkened auditoria. Summer is a time to take a break from daily life, to have adventures, encounter new people and places, to have the kinds of experiences that will later be made into films. A happy paradox: while summer may not be great in terms of box office numbers, it’s hugely rich in dramatic potential.
New York churns out films set in dog-day July and August. That’s when the city becomes a pressure cooker. School’s out, kids run wild. Humidity levels are high, tempers short. It doesn’t take much to tip stressed city-dwellers over the edge. Spike Lee exults in such fever-pitch atmospherics. He got the idea for Do the Right Thing (1989) from an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that discussed whether high temperatures turn people violent. Lee’s film, seen by some critics as inflammatory on its initial release, depicts Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood on the hottest day of the summer. Relations—especially between its mostly black residents and the owners of an Italian-American pizzeria—are already tense; in the course of 24 hours, and after police choke a local youngster to death, they get riotous.
Lee had his production designer use aggressive reds and oranges to make the streets looked inflamed. Characters play frenetic Public Enemy tracks on their boomboxes and communicate with each other with welterweight ferocity. The film used to be treated like a CNN dispatch, a snapshot of New York just before the Crown Heights riot of 1991 that pitted black and Jewish Americans against each other, as well as the stop-and-frisk policing brought in by mayor Rudy Giuliani in the same decade. Viewed today, a more traditional vision of summer in the city is apparent: the film’s characters lack air conditioning, so they live their lives outdoors—the older ones sit on stoops and watch the world go by; the younger ones, like figures in a 1940s Helen Levitt photograph, goof around in the streets and set off fire hydrants to keep themselves cool.
Summer brings sport. Lots of it. Anyone whose soundtrack was the commentaries of John Arlott or Brian Johnston will find it hard not to be gripped by Fire in Babylon, Stevan Riley’s 2010 documentary about the West Indian cricket team of the 1970s and 1980s. What a fearsome, glamorous spectacle they were. At the start of their 1976 tour of England, South African-born England captain Tony Greig notoriously declared that he intended “to make them grovel.” Immediately they saw themselves as actors in an anti-colonial drama. They drew inspiration from the uprisings in Soweto and the militancy of Jamaican reggae.
That endless summer, the hottest for decades, Michael (“Whispering Death”) Holding and Andy Roberts tirelessly unleashed 90mph deliveries directed at the English batsmen’s throats and ribcages. Their star batsman, Viv Richards, pulled and drove and hooked balls to the boundary with nonchalant violence. Meanwhile, their young fans sang and danced, turning the grounds into carnivalesque parties—offending the sensibilities of the cricketing establishment. The West Indies team has long been a shadow of its former self, but Riley’s film is a vivid remembrance of gladiatorial times past.
“The combination of ‘last’ and ‘summer’ occupies a special and lasting place in our consciousness,” writes Geoff Dyer in his recent book The Last Days of Roger Federer. No film exemplifies this better than the Joseph Losey-directed, Harold Pinter-scripted adaptation of LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1971). A simple and exquisitely painful story, it chronicles the summer when 12-year-old Leo is invited by a schoolfriend to his Norfolk country home. There he falls under the spell of blue-blooded Marian (played by a heartbreakingly beautiful Julie Christie) who persuades him to carry messages to a farmer (Alan Bates) with whom she’s having a secret affair.
Everything seems perfect. Hammocks and croquet, family silver and to-the-manor-born luxury. The days are so languid they will surely never end. Yet Leo’s on the brink of adolescence; and this arcadian Edwardian England will be fractured by the outbreak of the First World War. Soon enough, Leo is jolted out of his innocence. For decades he remains puzzled over what that summer meant. “The past is a foreign country,” he declares. “They do things differently there.” That insight brings him scant consolation in the winter of his life.
Few films are at once so pellucid or so gorgeously dark as Jacques Deray’s 1969 psychological thriller La Piscine. Almost all of it takes place in and around a swimming pool in a family villa on the Côte d’Azur. A writer (Alain Delon) and his girlfriend (Romy Schneider) are whiling away the summer months—soaking in the sun, barely moving except to shed their clothes and make love—when an old record-producer friend (Maurice Ronet) drops by with his teenage daughter (Jane Birkin). Initially this amounts to fun squared, but there are tense undercurrents which soon come to the surface.
La Piscine is opiated to the point of decadence. The camera is positively lascivious, zooming in on every bead of sweat on the glamorous cast’s bodies. That Delon and Schneider had been real-life lovers gives the drama an extra frisson. So does knowing that the year before the film’s release Delon was enmeshed in a scandal after his ex-bodyguard’s corpse was found in a dump, which in turn prompted salacious rumours involving former French prime minister Georges Pompidou’s wife. In 2015, the film was remade as A Bigger Splash by Luca Guadagnino, but the original is the more seductive slice of sunlight noir.
For me, the film that captures the possibilities and poetry of summer most headily is by Ingmar Bergman. Summer with Monika (1953) is essentially a jailbreak movie. The jail is many things—postwar Stockholm, horizonless working-class life, the cold Swedish winter. Monika (played by Harriet Andersson) is a passionate, headstrong daughter of an alcoholic father who often beats her. She dreams of another world far away from her family’s cramped tenement dwelling. Eventually she meets put-upon factory clerk Harry (Lars Ekborg). One summer morning, the pair collect a few of their belongings, sneak onto a docked boat, and set sail for the islands of the city’s archipelago.
They are reborn. Previously, they were surrounded by old people, invoices, chores, freezing park benches. Now, as their boat heads out of the Swedish capital, it is all widescreen skies, room to exhale, restorative light. For weeks on end, they become modern primitives living by their wits, hopping between islands, jiving to tunes on the gramophone Harry has brought along. They make love. Sometimes they fight. Monika gets pregnant. Her hunger to keep going is enthralling and occasionally frightening. Will Harry be able to keep up with her?
By the time he’d finished filming, Bergman was having an affair with Andersson. “I think the camera loves the particles that surround Harriet,” he later declared. In America, sleaze merchant Kroger Babb renamed the film Monika, The Story of a Bad Girl! and, by marketing it as an early nudie feature, made it an accidental advert for permissive Swedish culture. Still, it’s Monika’s defiant cry—“No, I’m not going back. I want summer to go on just like this”—that most resounds today. Here, as so often in the movies, summer is a sentimental education. A portal to feelings that, once experienced, are impossible to subdue.
