07/08/2023 - Set just before the onset of World War II, Laura Luchetti’s latest film is a coming-of-age story that is told, rather than felt

Yile Yara Vianello (left) and Deva Cassel in The Beautiful Summer

Premiering in the Piazza Grande section of this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Laura Luchetti’s The Beautiful Summer [+see also:
trailer
film profile] tells you a story, rather than making you feel it — which is a shame, considering that the specific time and place in which it is set could make for an absorbing window into a vanished world. Based on the novel of the same name by Italian author Cesare Pavese, the film centres on Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello), a young girl who works as a seamstress in 1938 Turin. She has moved from the countryside with her brother, Severino (Nicolas Maupas), an aspiring writer who blames the city for his recent lack of inspiration. His loneliness and melancholy as a boy from the country who feels lost in this modern environment immediately comes across as a very original and evocative experience, in part thanks to Maupas’ understated yet heartfelt performance. But the film is interested instead in Ginia’s more conventional coming-of-age journey, one guided by curiosity and naivety rather than heartache and confusion, as in Severino’s case. 

Ginia’s path is not without its disappointments, but before them comes the trepidation of new experiences, which Luchetti struggles to convey. It all begins with Amelia (Deva Cassel), a slightly older brunette that Ginia first sees emerging from a lake, her white underclothes stuck to her silhouette. Ginia seems intrigued (much of the film shows Vianello’s face as she reacts to the things she sees), but all the boys who ogle over Amelia are swift to shame her for showing her body. Some of these boys are Amelia’s friends and/or lovers, a fraught position that Luchetti niftily shows is only another facet of the ambient sexism of the times, where men feel entitled to both love and hate women as they please. At home or with friends, Ginia is constantly surrounded by men putting down women, criticising their emotions, their dress, their behaviour. This atmosphere, and the way the women navigate it by acting either shy (Ginia) or promiscuous (Amelia), is the film’s best realised aspect, placing the film decidedly in the past and resisting the impulse to retro-fit its story for modern sensibilities. 

From then on, however, we understand the women’s shifting relationship, and the way the beautiful stranger impacts Ginia’s own coming-of-age journey, on an intellectual rather than sensual level. It is a problem in a story about a young girl who finds her place in a new city by discovering her sexuality, guided by her desires even as they run against the expectations of her class and those of the people around her. When Amelia invites Ginia to join her and her painter friends at a party, it feels like a contrivance of plot rather than an organic event. Likewise when Ginia slowly but surely relaxes around these very arrogant, frankly horrible men who barely conceal their disdain for her. Much of this vagueness is resolved by Vianello’s performance, who plays Ginia as someone too eager to leave behind her sheltered upbringing (and lose her virginity) to hold a grudge for long. 

But it doesn’t resolve everything. When Ginia learns that Amelia makes a living posing for painters, it is unclear what she is most curious about: the art itself, or the fact that Amelia stands naked in front of many different men. Ginia herself does not seem to know, and her inability to put into words what is happening to her feels true to life. However, the film itself seems confused about it, offering no perspective on what she is going through and simply following her down these two parallel paths instead. Its perspective on the time period in which it is set is likewise non-existent, with glimpses of Blackshirts providing little more than historical background. It’s a shame, as the beautiful costumes by Maria Cristina La Parola and convincing production design by Giancarlo Muselli lay the foundations for a much more vividly felt film.

The Beautiful Summer was produced by Italian companies Kino Produzioni, RAI Cinema, and 9.99 Films. International sales are handled by True Colours.