“Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets…” (Derek Walcott)
French film 'Faustine and the Beautiful Summer' (original title: Faustine et le bel été), written and directed by Nina Companéez is a delicious sensual summer classic that I always eagerly return to when the hot and sticky days of June and July come around again. The filming took place from 28th July 1971 to 12th September 1971, and the film was released in January 1972. The summer setting fits the dreamy, indolent, sensual mood of the film so perfectly. Summer for ‘nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness… the August bedroom of tangled sheets…’, to quote Derek Walcott’s poem ‘Bleecker Street, Summer’.
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Pretty Sixteen Year Old Girl
The film follows the sensual awakening of the pretty sixteen year old girl Faustine (played by Muriel Catala) who came to the countryside for the summer to spend holidays with her grandparents. She is a curious yet solitary girl who likes to explore nature and spy on her neighbours. She is seen occasionally flirting with the handsome teenage boy named Joachim who resides nearby. Sometimes she is flirting, but mostly she takes a quiet, proud pleasure in rejecting him. Over time she develops an interest in Joachim’s uncle, a man probably twenty or more years older than she is. Eventually she gets friendly with the entire family and starts visiting them often.
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Francesco Hayez’s ‘The Kiss’
The sensuality of this coming-of-age film lies in the mood, the atmosphere, the suggestions rather than explicitness. It is a film made of subtle touches, long gazes, and tender tensions of the first awakening; an exploration of erotic art through the lens of adolescent femininity. The film’s slow pace and pastoral setting allows for the erotic tensions to be built subtly, focused on emotional nuance rather than overt sexuality. The film starts with a close-up view of a painting on the wall of Faustine’s bedroom. It isn’t just any random painting but an iconic Romantic masterpiece, Francesco Hayez’s ‘The Kiss’ (fig.6), painted in 1859, and in my view this sets the mood for the entire film.
Fig.6 ‘The Kiss’ by Francesco Hayez
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