With high school behind them and just waiting to start their adult lives in a few short weeks, a group of friends spend their days hanging around the coastal Mediterranean town of Marseille.  With the sun setting on their beach day, Malo (Matthieu Lucci) and Lola (Marcia Feugeas) go back for one final dip in the water, but with light quickly fading Lola gets lost in the water.  The disappearance rocks the friend group as Malo contends with feelings of guilt, and his girlfriend, Lise (Agathe Talrich), is unable to quell those feelings as she is still grieving the loss of her best friend.  

Nominated for The Golden Leopard and winning a special jury prize at the Locarno International Film Festival, Emilie Aussel’s debut feature, Our Eternal Summer, was brought to audiences in the United States by Mubi.  At what should be a concise 75 minutes, the film splits its time into two distinct chapters; with Lola, and without her.  It starts off conventionally enough, showcasing the teens as they enjoy bohemian freedom under the Mediterranean sun, but after the disappearance of Lola, the film takes a sharp turn to examine how grief can affect people differently, especially those at an age who have the excitement of life still ahead of them and the sense of false invincibility which that bestows upon them. 

Aussel opens the film with some loose scenes of the teens smoking, drinking, and lazing around as they vaguely talk about the adventures that await them.  Despite the world of opportunity they are about to enter, the cast of characters all seem very lethargic and aimless.  It goes beyond the sense that it is not just the pressure of the unknown, but a total lack of desire to even try and achieve or accomplish anything.  They are content to stay put, and maybe it is because they want to relish in every last moment the group has together, but it all feels very lazy in so far as the writing is concerned.  There is very little character motivation on the page so the young cast is forced into bland performances, and because they have so little to latch on to when building their character, even after Lola’s disappearance, the tragedy does not allow for growth since Aussel shifts this from an ensemble piece to something totally different. 

The lion’s share of the film finds Lise, who has now mostly abandoned her core friend group, running with a trio of amateur actors led by their director, Rita (Nina Villanova).  Rita is mounting a self-produced play about the dangers of drug use in which she stars alongside Marlon (Idir Azougli) and Cosmo (Antonin Totot), who had hooked up with Lola after a dance party at the start of the film.  It is a strange tangent to take after setting up the makings of a grief study in the first act of Our Eternal Summer, and the diversion of the plot does little in the way to help the film.  It briefly highlights two of the themes, how does one process grief, and Rita helps to open conversations about being afraid of not achieving all her goals – something Lola will never be able to do – but Aussel, instead of furthering her dissection, opts for some first-feature pizzaz like an extended scene of Rita dancing while being covered in body glitter or the stationary camera during the rehearsal scene.  It is meant to be taken seriously, as if it had a profound message behind it, and while the intention was most certainly true of heart, it reads like a scrapped iteration of the “High School Theatre” sketches on Saturday Night Live.  The entire film takes on this air of self-importance in the last two-thirds, and had it stayed with the core friend group that the film opened with instead of taking this detour to nowhere, Our Eternal Summer had the making for a seminal coming-of-age drama but instead fizzles away into festival nonsense. 

For every stumbling block the script takes, Aussel does what is perhaps the most important thing in a first feature and this is she shows her competency in setting up and capturing intriguing images.  Aided by camera work by Mathieu Bertholet, the duo creates a film with a strong visual identity that evokes feelings of those dog days of summer in the audience where the sun is high and hot and the concept of time has melted away in the afternoon rays.  The warm colors of summer and sun-tanned skin meld perfectly into the cooler colors of the sea, or nights in the streets where secrets can be shared, and these blissful memories are intercut with harshly lit moments where the teens can express their fears openly with the audience; feelings of loss, confusion, guilt, and rage.  The juxtaposition of styles adds a nice texture to the film and highlights the stark reality of the number of our own thoughts and emotions that we all hide from the public.  There is an irony created by the action of the film where the characters are in pain is photographed so beautifully, and the harshly lit moments where they are alone are the few times they are allowed to be totally vulnerable and find some answers to their suffering as they work through their loss. 

Our Eternal Summer is a flawed film, but still the heralding of a great talent.  Aussel mines the rich genre of coming-of-age drama to set up an incredibly interesting and engaging premise, and while she does not quite stick the landing, there is a lot of merit on the craft of what makes it to the screen.  Even when Lise separates herself from her friends to run with the troupe, there are promising decisions made in the camera placement and the scenes’ pacing.  The writing is the big thorn in the side of Our Eternal Summer, going off on a tangent that not only abandons the setup of the film but also finds Lise in a largely passive role, but with a more focused script in hand, Aussel is perfectly poised and capable of making something great.