15/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Valentine Cadic dives into the Olympic Games in Paris for an angelic debut feature, full of delicate and original charm

“I feel as though I’ve fallen into a breach in the space-time continuum.” Contrary to this affirmation by one of its protagonists, there is no trace of science-fiction in That Summer in Paris [+see also:
trailer
interview: Valentine Cadic
film profile] by Valentine Cadic, presented in the Perspectives section at the 75th Berlinale. And yet, the adventures that Blandine, who just turned 30 and has arrived from a small town in Normandy, experiences over a week during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, do look like an anomaly, a bizarre point where two sections of space-time touch. It is one of the great originalities of the 28-year-old French filmmaker’s debut feature that it has managed to take advantage of the unique atmosphere of popular fervor of the international sporting event, with its festive summer streets, its visitors from around the world and its giant outdoor screens, to insert a tender and offbeat fiction within it, an approach that recalls (albeit in an altogether different style) that of Justine Triet in Age of Panic [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile].

“I can’t go in at all, then?” For Blandine (Blandine Madec), it’s a cold shower when, despite her (sole) valid ticket, she is turned away at the entrance to the Olympic swimming competition in Nanterre because she hadn’t paid attention to security requirements (no bags allowed and, as a bonus, a damning comment coming out of a walkie-talkie: “people really are stupid”). We’re already far from the Arc de Triomphe from where, a few hours earlier, she had left a voice message to her Parisian half-sister (India Hair), whom she hasn’t seen for more than ten years, to let her know she’d arrived in the capital. It is therefore in the uncertain footsteps of this touching, chubby anti-hero that the film sets itself for seven days of urban wanderings, for adventures between burlesque and melancholy, with a touch of fairy tale kindly slipped in the angle of a social and cultural mirror that’s discreetly incisive (notably with the expulsions of homeless people provoked by the Olympic Games and the astronomical cost of attempts to depollute the Seine): “you should pay more attention to people like me. There are many people in this city who are not doing well and who need your help.”

Playing with contrasts between the Olympic effervescence and the reality of Blandine’s very solitary (although amidst the crowds) daily life, between the sporting events (almost) inaccessible for the common man and their overabundant relay over social media, between the “normal” life of the inhabitants of Paris’s popular neighbourhoods and the cosmopolitan agitation that seizes the city, between the capital and the provinces, between Blandine’s seemingly suspended present and the secrets of her family and romantic past that are slowly revealed, the film (with a script written by the director with Mariette Désert) walks around with “a very particular glow, at once transparent and opaque.” A delicate equilibrium between nothing and everything for a comedy following a protagonist with modern, distant perfumes à la Jacques Tati, who arrives in the big city with her innocence, a little like a fly in the ointment, but who eventually imposes her impalpable and touching charm.

That Summer in Paris was produced by Cinq de Trèfle and Comme des Cinémas. Urban Sales is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)