THAT KIND OF SUMMER: Fleeting Joy And Lasting Pain

In Denis Côte’s That Kind of Summer, several nymphomaniac women at an addiction recovery retreat experience different ways of coping with confronting their conditions. Geisha (Aude Matheiu) is irreverent and goes to a soccer field and take turns giving fellating to several players. Léonie (Larisa Corriveau) has horrific dreams about her father who sexually abused her. Eugénie (Laure Giappiconi) has quiet conversations with the retreat’s caretakers and draws in her spare time. Côte is often suggested as an empathetic director but he is also unflinching in his portrayal of vulnerability. His characters often showcase a raw openness that invites both a chance to empathize with them and also feel the difficult burdens and desires within them.

Sometimes Revealing and Sometimes Frustratingly Opaque

What Kind of Summer incorporates both the soft-horror elements of Côte’s 2019 Ghost Town Anthology and the intimacy of humans’ relationship to their bodies in his 2017 bodybuilding documentary A Skin So Soft. In a single summer, a group of young-ish women gathers at a rehabilitation center that aims to help them better understand the underlying causes of their nymphomania. The center isn’t explicitly implementing a program to help “cure” them but rather explores a more progressive approach of getting its residents to try to be inquisitive about their need for sexual contact.

In the same manner, Côte’s direction is inquisitive rather than intrusive, it fashions as a microscope rather than a scalpel. He doesn’t reveal information through the plot but rather sets his characters to be a wide range of personalities, both raw, revealing, and frustratingly opaque. Sexuality is in the fabric of the body, inseparable from the corporeal form.

An Intimate Relationship with the Body

The dichotomy of Côte’s direction, which gazes over the bodies of the actresses in deeply intimate ways, to the experiences and fantasies of the women, which are often rough and sometimes downright harrowing gives the movie an uneasy tension throughout. Every moment of silence still rings with the knowledge of pain and insatiable desire that’s bubbling underneath. Larisa Corriveau does stunning work under Côte yet again. Her sheepish demeanor, wandering like a phantom, is a retread of her work in Ghost Town Anthology, but here it adds extra dimensions.

Her downward turns and constant rubbing of her arms hide a sexual history that ranges from passionate to painful. Geisha recounts seeing one of her classmates have sex with multiple men at once. She recounts, “I couldn’t stop thinking about her. In my mind, she wasn’t a victim, she wasn’t to be pitied.” Like the bodybuilders in A Skin So Soft, the women in That Kind of Summer have an intimate relationship with their own bodies and use them sexually in ways that both embarrass and liberate them.

Conclusion:

Côte’s film is an empathetic examination of the thorns of sexual desire. It slowly blunts the sharp ends but doesn’t do so before inflicting the realities onto the audience as a means of understanding his characters better. In the end, like the retreat itself, the film doesn’t aim to find a cure or a lesson, or a package of ideas for its audience to take home. It instead simply sees people with a problem and gives us a few hours to see how they deal with living with its fleeting joys and lasting pains.

That Kind of Summer is currently streaming on MUBI for U.S. Audiences

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