That Kind of Summer (Denis Côté, 2022) (Patreon)

My description for the Viennale:

The protagonists of Denis Côté’s films often live on the margins, having been cast aside because of psychological wounds that refuse to heal. In his latest film, Côté considers the therapeutic situation itself. Un été comme ça takes place during a 26-day retreat for women who have been diagnosed as having sexual dysfunctions. Under the care of a young psychology researcher from Düsseldorf named Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle) and clinical assistant Sami (Samir Guesmi), the three women attempt to grapple with their respective demons.

Eugénie (Laure Giappoconi) is an artist plagued by intrusive sexual thoughts; Geisha (Aude Mathieu) is a sexual compulsive; and Léonie (Larissa Corriveau) is addicted to violent, multi-partner encounters. But the film does not take for granted that the retreat can heal these women, or that their predilections are “perversions” to be fixed. While so-called normal life may as yet elude them, they are also highly adept at mirroring ugly desires back to a male world that has largely defined them. A provocative interrogation of trauma, pathology, and consent, Un été comme ça is a film that will divide audiences and provoke passionate debate.

My thoughts on the film:

I believe I can understand what Côté was attempting with That Kind of Summer, and I sort of admire it. By focusing a film on the personalities and behaviors of women who have been officially declared deviant by the psychiatric / theraputic establishment, Côté broaches basic questions regarding the normal and the pathological. What's more, the inevitable sexual frankness of the film means that nothing less than the cinematic apparatus is at stake here. If the movies have traditionally been a medium for depicting women according to the logic of male desire, what happens when you make a film that is explicitly about women who seem to experience sexual dysfunctions brought about by their objectification by men?

Since this is not a documentary, we can observe the ways that Côté constructs the three women to reflect a spectrum of relative freedom or subjugation. Léonie explains how she was molested by her father for her entire life, and how she eventually developed a fetish for being ejaculated on because of her secret excitement at going to school with her father's cum dried on her thighs. Eugénie doesn't really have a backstory like this, and instead describes her sexual compulsions as psychological ruptures she can't control, much like suicidal ideation. But Geisha, by her own reckoning, just loves fucking men, and has made a reasonably good living at it.

If we understand That Kind of Summer to engage with the problem of cinematic exploitation -- that when you make a film about women who speak endlessly about their sexual exploits and masturbate furiously on camera, you are making something that dovetails with pornography -- then are the three main characters intended to show us some kind of differential where exploitation is concerned? That Geisha's character is ostensibly freer to exploit herself than Eugénie or Léonie? At a certain point, this just seems like hair-splitting, because Côté doesn't really depict these characters in different ways. (At base, this is a summer-camp / commune movie, sort of a Cassavetes-style variation on Nathan Silver's Stinking Heaven.)

It doesn't help that the theraputic scenario surrounding these women is highly unprofessional and even kind of lurid. Why would a women's retreat for sex addicts have a male assistant as one of three people they have regular contact with? And why are we pulled into Octavia's own romantic dramas? She conducts herself very much like a grad student who is in over her head, and is mostly concerned with eliciting confession from these women for her own research (and, in a late moment with Eugénie, her own erotic pleasure). I can understand Côté's impulse to make a messy film about human frailty, but the topic itself is already messy enough. He needed to exact more control over the material, not less. And since he didn't, That Kind of Summer is pretty much a total failure, an arty provocation cloaked in half-digested gender theory.