Review of “My Eternal Summer”: a touching Danish Weepie

Told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Fanny (Kaya Toft Loholt), the tale is intimate and deeply moving My eternal summer (Min Evige Sommer) observes an eventful holiday spent awaiting the death of Fanny's terminally ill mother, Karin (Maria Rossing). In delicately balanced scenes full of touching details, Danish director Sylvia Le Fanu (in her feature debut) and her co-writer Mads Lind Knudsen unfold a very Scandinavian portrait of a highly cultured bourgeois family facing a terrible trauma with stoicism , humor and a lot of drinking, often in tastefully furnished rooms.

After premiering in the New Directors section in San Sebastian, the drama takes a short break to screen at the BFI London Film Festival in another competitive section. His accessible depth of feeling could help him gain distribution beyond the Norse kingdoms.

My eternal summer

The bottom line

Sad smiles on a warm night.

Place: San Sebastian Film Festival (new directors)
Launch: Kaya Toft Loholt, Maria Rossing, Anders Mossling, Jasper Kruse Svabo
Director: Silvia Le Fanu
Screenwriter: Sylvia Le Fanu, Mads Lind Knudsen

1 hour and 45 minutes

Although Fanny appears in virtually every scene of the film, the camera occasionally cuts away to spend moments alone here and there with Fanny's parents, Karin and Johan (Anders Mossling), as they deal with the logistics and inner turmoil of Karin's impending situation. death, presumably from cancer. But the point of view is so ingrained in Fanny that, mimicking the way children live in blissful ignorance of how their parents provide for them, the sparse screenplay doesn't even tell us exactly what the couple do for a living – though the scenes of Karin playing the piano everywhere and her students' subsequent speeches suggest that she was a musician or music teacher, while Johan's wit and the way he carries around a book about the gulag suggest that he might be an academic.

The point is that this family unit of three is spending their last holidays together in their summer home, a charming seaside cottage located some distance from Copenhagen. Nobody's talking about work right now. Indeed, there isn't much conversation going on as the trio settle into the dusty house, accept delivery of a hospital bed (as Karin can no longer climb stairs) and make arrangements for the district nurse to make visits at home. for his last days.

A respectful only child, Fanny helps as much as she can, but she is still a teenager and therefore prey to her usual egocentrism. His frustration with the cottage's poor Wi-Fi signal is a clear sign of his restlessness as he deals with a deep sense of sadness over losing his mother, but also boredom.

Her relationship with boyfriend Jamie (Jasper Kruse Svabo), a sweet, dim-witted boy, takes up much of her mental bandwidth. After his brief visit in the first days of the trip, Fanny somewhat irrationally sees the subsequent lack of contact as a ghost, when in reality he is probably just busy with sport and life in the capital. He writes a wonderfully ugly self-pitying poem about the last time they said goodbye and reads it to Karin, who naturally at first thinks it's a poem about his impending departure. When she realizes that it's actually Jamie, she seems both slightly annoyed and slightly amused.

Such well-observed details are scattered throughout, revealing the complexity, fallibility and kindness of ordinary people. At one point, Fanny tries to take one of those online personality tests and asks her which of a series of three adjectives best describe her: “serious, honest, faithful”, for example, or “loving, intelligent, caring”. . ? Johan, contemptuous of all this reductive farce, suggests that she is “bossy”, and he is right. But Fanny is also all of the above, as well as angry, confused, and ultimately deeply empathetic once she stops fantasizing about Jamie.

As Karin's condition slowly worsens and friends come to say goodbye at her last birthday party, the poor little girl goes through all the stages of grief at once. In the end, he has enough fortitude to do the right thing for his mother and father.

The subject matter alone might be enough to unleash geysers of tears in viewers, but what makes Le Fanu's direction particularly impressive is its lack of sentimentality. Instead, it focuses on the daily rituals: the little murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the sense of exhaustion that lingers for hours, days, and weeks as you wait for someone to die.

Jan Bastian Munoz Marthinsen's bright, clean lighting patiently flanks the characters and doesn't draw any undue attention to itself. This also applies to Patricio Fraile's score and Frederik Lehmann Mikkelson's sound design, which work in close tandem, mixing the sighs of the cello with the sound of waves crashing on the shore in equal measure. Even the performances of the entire cast, but especially of Toft Loholt, Rossing and Mossling, are no less perfect.

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