That Kind of Summer Review: A Tender Portrait of Solidarity…and Sex Addiction

In its raw material—a handful of vibrant female characters, an ineffectual male figure, and a remote natural setting—Denis Côté’s That Kind of Summer echoes his last film, the archly minimalist Social Hygiene. But in style, tone, pacing, and intent, it’s pointedly different. The most immediately discernible tweak concerns the camerawork, which is handheld, freely mobile, and cozy with its subjects where Social Hygiene’s was fixed, deliberate, and detached. As the tense opening scene plays out entirely in context-eliding close-ups, one suspects that Côté is up to something equally rigorously schematic in his visual approach, trading deadpan Brechtian tableaux for a laser focus on facial minutia.

Any expectations of conceptual rigidity, though, are gradually dismantled as the film works through its various themes and ideas—and, indeed, the kind of top-down directorial ploys that Côté has occasionally employed in the past seem to run counter to his larger aims here. If Social Hygiene was the work of a director with a firm idea of what he wanted to say, and a hand-to-glove understanding of what canvas to use to say it, That Kind of Summer is more exploratory than prescriptive. Befitting the premise revolving around an experimental therapy retreat, the film is governed by the idea that an endpoint cannot be predicted or planned for, and it moves with the sense of volatility that arises from that belief.

Flipping Social Hygiene’s nonstop—and very funny—scrutiny of men, it’s the women who are under the microscope here. Three patients have arrived at a countryside cottage for a month-long reprieve from their insatiable sexual appetites, where they’re to be supervised in their “rehab” process by two social workers—one an Algerian immigrant named Sami (Samir Guesmi), the other a German therapist named Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle). Ranging in age and libidinal proclivities, the patients include Geisha (Aude Mathieu), a young, mischievous sex worker with a shaved head; Léonie (Larissa Corriveau), a cerebral victim of childhood trauma with an affinity for gang bangs; and Eugénie (Laure Giappiconi), an erratic artist who recontextualizes her bouts of submissive arousal as austere pencil-and-chalk scribblings.

Neither severely restrictive nor entirely laissez-faire, the treatment program comes with a sprawling backyard for lounging and a nearby lake for swimming, and wine freely flows over dinner. It’s not clear how the patients stumbled upon this fledgling program (there are intimations of only one prior session that may not have been entirely harmonious), and at times they’re less than cooperative with the compassionate Sami and Octavia and their gentle lines of questioning and low-key set of house rules. Nonetheless, they’ve made the commitment out of a mutual sense of their desires being self-destructive. The elimination of thoughts variously described as “violent,” “disgusting,” and “intrusive” would seem to be the goal, and Sami and Octavia, eschewing any codified psychoanalytic approach, encourage talking it out in the absence of extraneous distractions as the best method for healing.

One could imagine this scenario, under different hands, being played for easy irony. Serenity is the goal, so chaos reigns. The efficacy of hippy-dippy therapy retreats is roundly mocked, and the essential unknowability of human nature is confirmed. But That Kind of Summer never quite resolves into any one stance on its subjects, an equanimity that’s to its credit.

Carrying over from his documentary work, Côté’s m.o. here is one of observant immersion, which is not to say he foregoes cinematic expressiveness, but that he picks his spots wisely. Much of the film is devoted to lengthy one-on-ones in which the camera suggests a hovering bystander, responsive to the actors’ whims rather than dictatorial of them. The approach is typified by his rendering of several marathon monologues delivered by Léonie. As Corriveau inhabits an internal storm of pride, apathy, and self-flagellation, Côté doesn’t cut away to fantasies or flashbacks or chop her revelations up into neat shot-reverse-shot patterns; instead, we get uninterrupted access to the character’s almost hypnotized introspection.

When fantasy does periodically enter the picture—as in Léonie’s nightmare vision of her abusive father emerging from a tub in an abandoned warehouse, or Octavia imagining an enormous arachnid crawling on her bedroom wall—it feels like a limiting substitution for the emotional complexity played out in more organic ways elsewhere. Shrewder are the intermittent digressions away from the retreat, when the women, taking advantage of the retreat’s open-door policy, decide to return to their old relationships and habits.

As in the moments of complete surrender back at camp, there’s not a hint of judgment in these seeming behavioral relapses. When Geisha playfully scours a men’s soccer practice for willing partners, or when Eugénie showers a stunned trucker with permissions of what he can do to her sexually, or when Léonie retires to the home of a former partner to be hoisted into midair by a strenuous contraption of pullies and ropes, the emphasis is on the mundanity of these encounters rather than any potential shock value. Even in the latter scene, the tension created by a long, suspenseful build-up of close-ups showing ropes tightening and limbs splaying out is swiftly dissolved by a shot of Léonie and her lover engaged in a placid post-coital embrace.

One might reasonably surmise that That Kind of Summer’s aim is to destigmatize sex addiction—to render it with dignity and humanity and even a touch of reverence. But if that were the extent of what the film was up to, it might not have taken such a roundabout way of getting there. Indeed, it approaches Octavia’s unspoken romantic troubles with a lover back home or Sami’s posture of uncomplicated affability and empathy as equally worthy of dramatic attention as any of the three patients’ more sensational predicaments.

More than anything, That Kind of Summer reveals itself as a pandemic film in substance more than texture, thus separating it from Social Hygiene, which only superficially evoked quarantine—albeit unintentionally—by keeping its characters at least six feet apart. This is a film that dramatizes, at generous length, the cohabitation of a fixed group of people who are deprived of their familiar lifestyles, and it emerges not with a cynical depiction of strangers tearing each other apart but rather a tender portrait of solidarity.