Chi Film Fest: "Summer of 85"
Friday, October 23, 2020 at 1:15PM Coverage from the 56th annual Chicago Film Festival
by Nick Taylor
One fun thing about not really watching trailers anymore is that a movie can surprise me pretty easily. For example, I knew from teasers that François Ozon’s Summer of 85 was pitching itself as the French answer to Call Me By Your Name. The story sees two incredibly handsome teenagers named Alex (Felix Lefebvre) and David (Benjamin Voison) have a life-altering romance during a life-changing special summer. But I completely missed the trailer that revealed a whole second narrative where a zombie-like Alex is being tried for an unspecified crime that sounds a lot like murdering David.
So, there’s the part of Summer of 85 that’s very much Ozon doing a Call Me By Your Name-style romance and the part that's the melancholic aftermath...