Hot Summer Nights : July - August Theme
“Happens every summer. When the air’s so heavy you can’t breathe… the nights turn long and sleepless…when you long for cooler times…when you know what that is, it’s gonna tear you apart.”
There’s a spell each year defined by the in-between: summer. In years past, the season offered a particular sense of refuge and nonchalant drift that was just as easy to breathe in as it was hard to breathe out. It was a through-line feeling, existing independent of any responsibilities or fears. For it was summer and in the summer we knew how to live out of time and walk in the sun. Those days are rarer now, but the dream never cools.
Remember how the days would lose shape in the heat? A never-long-enough stretch that felt like forever. Where the calendar and clock became something like artifacts, more to do with museums than our day. Remember striking off to the beach on a whim before spending the whole day there? When late night fireside conversations under the moonlight ran into the early morning but it didn’t matter because you were just glad to be with your friends? The memory of summer is endless and to remember summer means to long for it again. Road trips to places unknown. Camping in the back country. Afternoons lounging at the pool. Golden hour grilling in the park. All time spent with the people you love and the people you’re searching to love. You know it because you’ll never forget those HOT SUMMER NIGHTS.
This month’s theme is dedicated to the films that feel like summer more than anything else. On the surface, they bear the hallmarks of the summer time — endless sunshine, coastal beaches, seasonal vacations — but underneath they distill the essence of the season and capture the memories made therein. It can be as emblematic as the beach of Amity on the fourth of July weekend, or it can take the shape of a cross country road trip where formative experiences transpire within the brief window known as summer vacation. Occasionally it’s a tangible visceral heat that inches hotter until conflict boils over, and other times it’s running for your life at Camp Crystal Lake. These films can take us back to simpler times when all we had to worry about were the plans for the next day and who it would be with, because even though summer comes around every year, it’ll never be the same as those Hot Summer Nights.
Jaws
(Steven Spielberg, 1975)
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
On the Fourth of July weekend, denizens of the New England area flock to the beaches of Amity Island for a holiday retreat. Welcomed with open arms by Mayor Vaughn, they pack the coast as far as the eye can see, soaking up the sun and awaiting the 50th Annual Amity Regatta to begin. As the summer heat cooks the sand beneath their feet and sea salt wafts through the air, sun bathers lay down their beach blankets and prop up their umbrellas. Recreational enthusiasts draw their sails for a day out at sea. And kids grab their inner-tubes to cool off in the ocean, collectively confident that nothing could go wrong on America’s birthday. But there’s something in the water. Something that’s twenty-five feet long with five rows of teeth, pitch black eyes, and three tons of finely tuned mass designed for the sole purpose of eating, swimming, and producing offspring: a great white shark.
A few days earlier, this alpha predator claimed its first victim, and for police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), it has been the focal point of all his fears ever since. Tranquil islander life is supplanted by mounting trepidation for his community, anxiety towards his familial duties of father and husband, and perhaps worst of all, his fear for the water itself. Enlisting the help of expert marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and contracting veteran fisher Sam Quint (Robert Shaw), the trio venture out into open waters to kill that which has brought about the town’s greatest terrors and confront their greatest fears.
As one of the most important films in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is seminal in more ways than one, but it starts with being the quintessential summer film. In fact, it’s so synonymous with the season that its inclusion on this list runs the risk of being cliché. However, here and now, in the summer of 2020, Jaws has a new found and unintentional relevance. In the wake of the coronavirus, with America prematurely reopening and citizens throwing caution to the wind with their own safety and others’, one does not have to look long nor hard to find parallels.
A former realtor turned mayor champions Amity’s reopening in order to achieve economic windfall, ignoring any and all advice from the scientific experts. False declarations of victory made long before the real threat has been contained, spurring public confidence in their own safety unbeknownst to the true danger. Americans flock to the beaches knowing full well it’s one of the most dangerous places to be in the current moment. It is a tad ironic that one of the most widely seen American films has had one of its defining lessons all but forgotten by large swaths of the population. Even forty-five years after its initial release, it would appear that American apathy for taking issues seriously is still as American as apple pie.
-Greg Arietta
A Bigger Splash
(Luca Guadagnino, 2015)
“We're all obscene. Everyone's obscene. That's the whole fucking point.”
Luca Guadagnino is a master at capturing the visceral atmosphere of a hot summer night on screen. Having earned himself a reputation of sorts for directing hedonistic dramas set 'somewhere' in Italy with I Am Love (2009) and more recently Call Me By Your Name (2017), the second film in Luca Guadagnino’s Desire trilogy, A Bigger Splash (2015), is inspired both by the Hockney painting of the same name and Jacques Deray’s 1969 film La Piscine. On a small island just off the coast of Sicily, in the strait between Italy and Tunisia, a seemingly idyllic landscape becomes the backdrop to a dramatic vacation that’s ruinously marred by erotic jealousy.
Tilda Swinton stars as Marianne Lane, an internationally acclaimed singer who’s in recovery from a recent surgery. Having lost her voice, she is forced to communicate non-verbally — somewhat ironic given her profession. Her forced silence creates the perfect setup for drama as she and her partner, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), are joined by old friend and ex-boyfriend Harry (Ralph Fiennes) with his formerly estranged daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) at their scenic villa. The unlikely group spend a fateful few days together living the ‘dolce vita’ while tension builds between lovers old and new. Frustrated desire becomes intensified by a palpable heat that escalates and, as in some of Guadagnino’s other works, ultimately boils over under the searing Italian sun. Each entry in the Desire trilogy provides a good dose of summer-time drama, but A Bigger Splash is sure to make you sweat with anticipation.
-Ivy Pottinger-Glass
Friday the 13th Part 2
(Steve Miner, 1981)
“I don’t want to scare anyone, but I’m gonna give it to you straight about Jason… if you listen to the old-timers, they’ll tell you he’s still out there.”
No other slasher screams “summer” quite like the Friday the 13th franchise, and Part II encapsulates the best of both season and subgenre. In case you’ve forgotten anything, the film kicks off with an extended recap —a solid 15% of the film’s whole runtime—of the events of the previous film, including Pamela Vorhees’ demise and the apparent return of Jason. Five years after the first massacre, another band of young counselors in training once again trespass at Crystal Lake, doomed to the same dark fate.
Part II tantalized and thrilled droves of teens at the drive in and late night screenings in the summer of 1981. They saw themselves in the carefree and lively counsellors on a lake where the main activities are drinking, skinny dipping, and telling scary stories around the campfire. Now it harkens back to a “classic” American camp experience, a simpler bygone time. And at the center of Part II is the classic Summer pastime of teens everywhere: rule breaking.
Though they are not children themselves, the characters in Part II brush off the advice of their elders like the local cop and Crazy Ralph, lacking any real adult supervision. And Jason too has been left unsupervised, his mother slain before his eyes. Despite the foreshadowed doom, the film has a sharp sense of humor, like sight gags that cut from a puppy’s encounter with the murderous Jason to a grill full of sizzling hotdogs.
The film culminates in a thunderstorm as couples flirt and pair off for intimate rendezvous and Jason hunts them from the shadows. The audience identifies with their carousing while also fully aware this night will likely be their last alive. It is both a teen’s wet dream and nightmare, all rolled into one summer evening.
-Megan Bernovich
Y tu mamá también
(Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
“Truth is cool but unattainable... the truth is totally amazing, but you can't ever reach it.”
The opening salvo to Y tu mamá también is a pair of scenes that separately introduce its two leads, teen boys, in consummate summer wear: naked, then, half in-and-out of clothes trying to be. Their pose is classic for the season as they desperately clamber over their partners and beds in a carnal sprawl. The inclination to search for relief in another person’s body during the heaviness of summer is a confused expression of both pleasure and pain not unique to teenagers. Sex has always been a matter of performance though, not just physically but dramatically too. There is a mostly constant truth in the bared privates but the inner person can remain obscured or hidden entirely from the act easily. So begins a film concerned with people and their bodies, how they reveal themselves to each other, and how they hope for release in, or from, each other.
It is impossible to talk about Y tu mamá también without mentioning its long pedigree and influence. The 2001 Alfonso Cuarón directed feature is significant for launching the careers of its young and handsome leads Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as well as being one of the most realized works of Cuarón and his frequent collaborator/cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The film marks the breakout moment in the filmographies of these actors and artists whose work would come to define 21st Century cinema, and the film itself remains as vital and energized as ever, radiant still as the quintessential summer road film.
The film follows Tenoch Iturbide and Julio Zapata (Luna and Bernal), two young friends of different classes living in Mexico City the summer before university. Their initial dilemma seems like no dilemma at all: their girlfriends depart for the summer to travel abroad, and the boys are now free to get laid, party, and pass the time as they please. Their anticipation, and juvenile presumption, of hedonism give way to the ache of horniness and boredom. They are roused from their doldrums when they meet Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú), the unfulfilled wife of Tenoch's cousin Jano. She is beautiful and young yet at least a decade older than the boys, a fact which only raises the degree of her seduction in the boy’s eager eyes.
When they meet at a family wedding, the sunlight comes through stronger, drinks and necks perspire. There, and in the immediate way that only summer heat could precipitate, the trio’s lives begin melting into one another’s. Burning with desire, Tenoch and Julio improvise an upcoming road trip to a fantasy destination, and because it is summer their imagination instinctually assumes the form of the already ideal climax to summer travel — a beach they name the fantasy Boca de Cielo, or Heaven’s Mouth. They invite the melancholic Luisa, she agrees, and the three embark on their adventure.
The bulk of the film is their journey and its ethereal experience that can feel like both the sweat on your forehead confirming the impossible heat of summer and the breeze that relieves it. Y tu mamá también will always resonate in the swelter of summer for its dynamism: a raunchy, funny road trip that is also an emotional exploration of personhood and country, blending the personal with the political and the intimate with the historical. It affirms the spell of summer by deepening it. The film makes it impossible to believe that the value of the season could be distilled down to anything purely syrup and simple. The dream of summer should not be that life is soft for us when we fall, but that we are willing to reach out our hands and touch life as it is, if only while in the heat.
-Dante Hay
BARTON FINK
(Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991)
Although Barton Fink qualifies for so many cinematic categories —noir, buddy film, thriller, black comedy— I would like to humbly enter one more:Barton Fink is a summer movie.
Not for any summer day mind you but for the days where any shade from the sun is treasured. When your clothes stick to your skin with perspiration at the simplest movement and it’s too hot even for the beaches, so you’re left exhausting the activities you can do semi-motionless until you whittle those down to boredom. Then it’s just you, your thoughts, and what you do with them.
Barton Fink, the man (John Turturro), rides the thoughts he shares from his typewriter to Broadway where a wave of acclaim lands him in the sandy shores of 1941 Hollywood. Immediately the contradictions of Tinseltown are apparent and unnerving to him. Hotels are vast but nearly empty. Executives greet Barton like old friends when meeting for the first time. Outwardly things seem functional but underlying everything is a mysterious and foreboding presence. Not to mention, the very walls seem to be sweltering. With severe writer’s block and a looming screenplay deadline, Barton is looking everywhere for inspiration but is finding only distraction. He is constantly daydreaming about a beach.
Barton Fink, the movie, is off-kilter and as you warm to its tone, you unwittingly give it more attention. Every plodding turn of events draws you deeper into a mysterious well of Golden Age references and entertainment criticism. When your skin, the walls, and the world feel like they’re melting, Barton Fink maybe is not the balm to soothe you. But it has just enough heat and mystery to accompany the hot drudgery when the annual dog days of summer come around.
-Kevin Conner
Crazed Fruit
(Kō Nakahira, 1956)
“We live in boring times.”
“Exactly, so we make boredom our credo.”
When making selections for Hot Summer Nights, the teen beach film felt like a righteous inclusion. Films like Beach Blanket Bingo, Pajama Party, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are full of hyper-sexualized teens grooving out to rad music on the beach while Suzy gets her tan on and Jim catches some gnarly waves. It was a portrait of the American youth sold by Hollywood to capture the dollars of affluent teens in the post-WWII period, embodying the Malibu style of free-living and hanging loose. These films (and more) certainly check the box for summer films, but they’re also imperfect time capsules, making them hard to recommend without major caveats. But across the Pacific Ocean on the beaches of Japan, Kō Nakahira created one of the most historically important films in the genre: Crazed Fruit.
Based on the book of the same name by writer Shintaro Ishihara, Crazed Fruit truthfully belongs to the Taiyozoku (Sun Tribe) genre. Originally coined as a way to describe the “the rich, bored, and vicious characters” of Ishihara’s books, Taiyozoku was also applied to the films that showed affluent teens in post-WWII Japan who lounged around all day and participated in loose social morals such as gambling, drinking, and *gasp* casual sex. Dripping in smooth jazz and seaside attire, Crazed Fruit follows two brothers, Haruji and Natsuhisa, who both fall for Eri, a young woman married to an older American man. As Eri starts to have true sentiments for Haruji, Natsuhisa grows increasingly jealous of his younger brother. The result is an explosive overflow of toxic behavior by way of lust, love, and youthful intimacy.
At the time, Japanese censors had no rules for what was depicted. Angsty youth with little respect for authority. Apathetic teens who lounged around the beaches all day and partied all night. Explicit allusions to sexual deviancy. As you would expect, films that contained disgruntled youth acting out so vigorously quickly became “the target of a moral panic over [their] corrupting influence … on Japanese youth.” Sun Tribe films rose in prominence in the summer of 1956, and by that fall, the public outcry was so vocal that the industry deployed self regulation, vowing to never again produce another Taiyozoku film again. But it was too late. The images of rebellious youth were already captured, their memory exposed under the light of the hot summer sun and saved for every generation to come.
-Greg Arietta
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(Anthony Minghella, 1999)
“I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”
Do you feel restless? Your life could be filled with the finer things like decadent wines, serene Italian beaches, raucous jazz clubs, and high vaulted ceilings. Why isn’t it? Is wealth holding you back? For Tom Ripley it seems to be.
Tom is a pianist who is so broke he has to borrow a friend’s sport coat to meet the dress code at his own gigs. It’s at one of these gigs where a party attendee mistakes Tom and his Princeton emblazoned jacket as a peer of his own son in school. He promises $1,000 if Tom can convince his son, Dickie (Jude Law), to return from Europe. Tom doesn’t correct the man about knowing Dickie and takes the expense paid trip overseas to find director Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
For many, summer means travel and heat. Minghella makes sure to place his story against a backdrop that any high school European class trip would envy. Those aforementioned decadent wines, serene Italian beaches, raucous jazz clubs, and high vaulted ceilings all make their presence known. Cobblestones streets and gorgeous boat rides in the Italian summer heat have you perspiring with the young ensemble of Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The fact that you get a compelling tale of fragile egos, uncontrollable emotions, and insidious love woven together is just a bonus. For now, while we ourselves are prevented from most travel, it feel right to dive right in with The Talented Mr. Ripley. The water is warm!
-Kevin Conner
Wake in Fright
(Ted Kotcheff, 1971)
“Have a fucking pint with us, John."
Hailing from Down Under, Wake In Fright holds a rare duo of classifications- a Christmas film and a Summer film. It is possibly the second sweatiest film ever conceived, only after William Friedkin’s explosive jungle thriller Sorcerer, and while equally as grimy, Wake In Fright’s heat is arid and dusty.
It introduces the seemingly mild mannered schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) releasing his pupils for their holiday season. Resentful of the government contract indenturing him to education in the desolate outback, John looks forward to his own vacation with his sweetheart in Sydney. Yet along the way he finds himself stuck in a pit stop mining town Bundanyabba, and though repulsed by its slovenly and eccentric locals, his attempts to move on are derailed. The ‘Yabba trap John in a cycle of gambling and black out drinking, and introduce him to the alcoholic vagabond doctor “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasance). Doc entices him to give in further to the drunken stupor, and philosophizes about the hypocrisy of civilization.
The film studies the White masculine id and the violence and chaos it wreaks when left unhindered. It peels away a civil exterior to reveal a primal madness beneath, too searing hot for any reason and discipline. Sexual desire is also sweaty and laced with danger, the urges of another base instinct. Even time seems to melt from day to night, as the debauchery takes a more vicious turn.
The film implements daylight horror, but its most harrowing and disturbing moments take place in the cover of dark. The most infamous of this is a non simulated kangaroo hunt, where the animals are mowed down by the men’s rifles in a display of graphic barbarism. Even if John can escape this living hell, it has irreversibly altered his psyche. And after these hot summer nights in the ‘Yabba are over, all that he is left with is disturbing nightmares and a killer hangover.
-Megan Bernovich
Rear Window
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
“Oh dear, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. ”
The camera moves out of the rear window of a second-story New York apartment and scans across the facing courtyard. It settles on the dozing L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. Cut to a thermometer: almost 100 degrees. It’s a scorcher, and everyone’s windows are wide open. Jeff, unable to leave his sweltering apartment due to a broken leg, has nothing better to do but spy on his neighbours…
What’s brilliant about Rear Window’s opening is that we’ve already seen pretty much everything we’re going to see. Like Jeff, the camera never really departs from the vantage point of his room. The summer setting only adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere as Hitchcock quickly turns up both the temperature and tension to nearly unbearable heights. Has Jeff witnessed his neighbour Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) murder his wife? Or, as his caretaker Stella (Thelma Ritter) and glamorous girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) insist, is the boredom and the heat just getting to his head?
Not just a masterwork of economic filmmaking, Rear Window has also firmly rooted itself into popular culture; it’s been pastiched by De Palma and parodied by The Simpsons, and there’s even a sort-of-remake with a teenage Shia LaBeouf in the Jeffries role. But as a thriller about voyeurism – and as a meta-meditation on the cinemagoer’s own voyeuristic tendencies – Rear Window is still unmatched.
-Theo Rollason