Film Review: “Summer of 85”
François Ozon’s Summer of 85 (Été 85) announces itself as a story about a corpse, one that had a particularly “terrible effect” on our epicene young lead, the 16-year-old Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), as he states in opening voiceover. “What interests me is Death with a capital D,” he claims, which is perhaps to say, what interests him is growing up. The tale that follows charts the end of—what is for him burdensome—innocence, a largely winsome memoir of doomed first love based on Aidan Chambers’s 1982 novel Dance on My Grave, which so touched Ozon when he discovered it as a teenager that it […]