Quebecer Denis Côté is a prolific and often disconcerting director. “A Summer Like That”, his fourteenth feature film in sixteen years, talks about the sexual addictions of three young women gathered in a mansion to talk about their desires and traumas. A very special retreat in the company of two sexologists which quickly turns out to be above all spiritual. A cinematographic creation where nudity is transformed into a metaphor for a society without judgement. Maintenance.
RFI : A summer like this is first of all a very closed universe before becoming a social space capable of giving birth to confessions. Our time marked by the Covid pandemic, where individuals are more and more closed in on themselves, has it changed your view of the world as a filmmaker? ?
Denis Cote : I’m going to have to tell you: “No”. The long period of the Covid pandemic, I did not experience it in fear. I didn’t experience it badly. I don’t have a big family, I live alone. So my head was still in “normal” life. Last year, I managed to make a film called Social hygiene and where the pandemic was not in my head. When I made this new film, it was not related to the Covid at all, the pandemic did not affect me creatively.
Why did you choose a closed place, a house located in the woods ?
To be honest, I have health problems… For that, I wanted a calm film that would be shot easily, because I have very little energy. For this, the film is also quiet and in one place. It was to help me. It has nothing to do with the pandemic or anything else.
The story ofA summer like this takes place in a rest home welcoming three young women tormented by their sexuality : Léonie, Geisha and Eugenie. What did you have in mind before filming ? A camera ? A form of catharsis in the form of road movie interior ? A Greek Mythology ?
The spark of the film was simple: I reflected on the cinema of Quebec and I said to myself: why, for twenty-five years, in Quebec, there are very few films on the subject of sexuality? Why don’t we see a lot of nudity in Quebec cinema? Why do we never talk directly about nudity? Are Quebecers prudish? I was asking myself. Afterwards, I started reading books about sexology, about the term “nymphomania”. And I was starting to get more and more serious. I started writing a screenplay about beautiful, complex human beings. And the more that I advanced in the writing, the less the film seemed to speak about sexuality, the more the film spoke about us. Of our intimate lives. And I started to like these women a lot. I started to get scared, because it’s 2022, I’m male, straight, white, middle-aged, so I have to be careful. The writing game was as delicate and as respectful as possible. Accompany these women in a world that I do not know. I had to keep a kind of humility, modesty to approach this big black hole, because I don’t know female sexuality.
what did you discover ?
The film has become a tightrope walk where I have to be careful not to fall. I locked these women in a house. It’s a retreat that doesn’t exist in real life. I made it all up. There are no two universities that would do such a project. And I put a man in the story. Normally, there would be no man in such a house. It’s a playful movie. But, in the end, it’s not just a sex movie or a movie about sex, but about the beauty of human beings, our flaws, our qualities and our faults. And when the film ends, you say to yourself: what did it say? Maybe nothing. And maybe all at once, because human beings are beautiful in their imperfections.
This house has the particularity that nothing is forbidden in relation to sexual behavior or thoughts. Does the heart of the film lie in the behaviors and thoughts of the young women or rather in the very special social space that you have created through this film and where you have notably excluded society ?
If I’ve left out anything, it’s judgment. It would be easy to make a film with certainties and judgments. If I start this film deciding that my characters have problems, that their problems have to be solved, that therapy has to be done, this film would be a disaster. That is to say that I decide to be a sexologist, a scientist, an expert on the question, and the film will go wrong. That would be bullshit. What I’ve done is take away all that too serious side of pseudo-sexology or pseudo-science, and I’m just observing. I let my characters be what they are. This immense freedom allows me to do a lot of things in the staging. It was by keeping myself very far from all the judgments that I managed to finish this film instead of doing bullshit.
The story revolves around the work of two therapists. While making this film, did you discover any similarities between the work of a therapist and that of a director ?
The filmmaker is obliged to work with questions, never with answers, never with messages. We don’t make films to teach people things and to find answers to questions. We make films to ask questions and explore things. Therapists are there to find answers and find treatments. Well, that makes me laugh. He is the opposite of a filmmaker. And if you look closely at the film, the two therapists who are in the film, at some point, it turns around and they are the ones who become the patients… Because they have as many problems as the patients. The film can be seen as a snub to all those therapists who claim to be able to cure us. No, there are no similarities between therapists and filmmakers. In any case, I shouldn’t behave like a therapist…