For a certain audience, director Kaveh Daneshmand’s “Endless Summer Syndrome” will raise red flags. At a time when explicit sex in film alone has become contentious, it’s not only about an age-gap relationship, but goes much farther, into father-son incest. The story has some similarities to Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” released earlier this year, and the two films have a reluctance to pass judgment or come up with all the answers. They don’t spend time moralizing about their characters’ actions, preferring to explore the effects of their behavior instead. “Endless Summer Syndrome” zooms in on the impact a two-year affair between Antoine (Mathéo Capelli) and his adopted son Aslan (Gem Deger, who co-wrote the story and was one of the film’s producers) has upon Antoine’s wife Delphine (Sophie Colon). Learning about their relationship makes her realize that her place within their marriage is very precarious.
“Endless Summer Syndrome” is structured around a weekend, running from Friday to Sunday. Antoine and Delphine’s family are relaxing during the summer. A lawyer, Delphine speaks on a Zoom meeting about the family as the place where children first encounter violence. Through the window, she sees Antoine, who’s revising his latest novel, by the pool. Casual nudity sets up an expectation of titillating sex scenes to follow.
She receives a phone call from an anonymous woman who claims that she met Antoine at a party where he was very drunk. The caller says Antoine told her he was having sex with one of his children. Shocked, Delphine tries to test the veracity of her statement. She suspects that Antoine is molesting 16-year-old Adia (Frédérika Milano). At the end of Friday, she witnesses Antoine and Aslan touching each other by the pool, and on the next day, she insists that the latter delay his move to New York. Later, she places a phone in the couch so that she can eavesdrop on her family.
The film is deceptively bright. Set during the summer, the light could hardly be more sunny. Yet their home comes to feel like a prison. (A rope swing, dangling outside their house, splits up the frame like a jail cell’s bars.) The aspect ratio is a square, leaving the image without any room to breathe. The director says “my intentions with the visual language of the film, framing, concise shot-list, and aspect ratio were in line with the confinement which the family wrestles with throughout their dark journey. This is also accentuated by the secluded emptiness of the landscape that surrounds them and cuts them off from the rest of the society.” Cinematographer Cédric Larvoire’s images become less pretty. To a woman trapped by misery, pleasant surroundings no longer seem to matter much.
The family’s four members are stuck with each other, growing to hate the situation and themselves. They’re disconnected from the wider world, with no support system of family or friends. Who knows whom the woman that calls Delphine is, or what her motives are? On the surface, their behavior represents friendly, even liberated attitudes: Delphine and Aslan share a joint. Still, they remain deeply repressed, unable to speak the word “incest” aloud or have a healthy conversation about their predicament.
French cinema has been full of love stories about older men and much younger women, and until recently, they received little criticism. Bertrand Blier’s 1981 “Beau Pere” came close to celebrating incest, while Louis Malle’s 1971 “Murmur of the Heart” crossed over that line. “Endless Summer Syndrome” mines dark comedy from its premise, while seeing its tragic potential too.
Were it an American film, “Endless Summer Syndrome” would either play its premise for shock value or work overtime to convince us it’s on the side of the angels. Daneshmand does neither. The darkness of the last half hour makes it clear he’s not condoning Antoine and Aslan’s relationship, but his film goes to places rarely seen outside pornographic fantasy. Aslan seems to believe what he’s saying when he insists he’s not being abused or manipulated. To him and Antoine, the fact that they’re not biologically related helps justify their actions. However rich and privileged Delphine may be, she can’t prevent herself from being hurt by men, registered in a grimace that deepens by the hour. “Endless Summer Syndrome” is a provocation with a rare respect for the spectator’s own moral compass.
“Endless Summer Syndrome” | Directed by Kaveh Daneshmand | Altered Innocence | In French with English subtitles | Premieres on VOD (Amazon and Vimeo) and opens at the Quad on December 13th
