Watch List | Summer
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By Christina Newland13th August 2024
As the heat rises during the summer months, so too can the emotional temperature – something many celebrated film-makers have captured with their depictions of intense seasonal flings.
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Most of us know what it is to have a summer fling; probably as much from life experience as any motion picture about the subject. There's the listless feeling of adolescent summer holiday boredom; the irritation of the heat; the chance to meet at beaches, parks, pools, or in foreign spots where everyone is thrown out of their usual rhythms. There's just something about the blue skies of a hot summer that can drive people to romantic fantasy and lustful thinking, and cinema has long chased the depiction of that usually all-too-brief excitement. Ephemeral and sexy, hot summer romances have been depicted by film-makers from Eric Rohmer to Spike Lee to Luca Guadagnino. Here are 10 of the very best.
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1. Badlands (1973) dir Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick's languorous summer romance is one that goes chillingly awry – that is to say, on a largely unmotivated killing spree. A sociopathic but charming young man, Kit (Martin Sheen, aping James Dean) and a younger, wide-eye teen, (an unforgettable Sissy Spacek, with a drawling, poetic voiceover) hit the road and begin to kill, with very little reason or even particular animus. Based on a real series of shocking murders by a teen couple in 1950s America, Malick uses the lovers-on-the-run trope of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to create a less frenetic and more disturbing vision of young love as a pathology. Badlands announced the immense talent of Malick on to the film scene, and a malevolent streak in the soul of the American Midwest.
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2. Call Me by Your Name (2017) dir Luca Guadagnino
It's a definite cliché: a formative summer fling which also serves as a powerful coming-of-age story. But Guadagnino has all the elements of this one just right: a hallowed academic background for a hot 1980s Italian summer of hedonism; the classical and the profane coalescing; the gay romance at the centre. There's the frisson between pretty teen Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father's hunky US apprentice in archaeology, Oliver (Armie Hammer); the cerebral patter and slow burn build toward physical intimacy is remarkably well-choreographed. It's not a huge surprise that the movie now is regarded as a milestone in queer cinema. The film also features a truly show-stopping performance from Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio's kindly father; there’s something so moving about loving parents who both support their child's choices and also know they cannot protect their son from his first heartbreak.
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3. Roman Holiday (1953) dir William Wyler
There's a holiday romance, and then there's falling in love with Gregory Peck. Peck, playing a reporter sent to snoop on the life of a cosseted continental princess – the sparkling Audrey Hepburn – instead goes off with her on an unsanctioned adventure across Rome. As well as being Hepburn's big breakout role, the film was shot on location, making the most of The Eternal City's most picturesque locations, from the Spanish Steps to the Roman Forum. Hepburn is delightful as a woman desperate to let her hair down and leave her gilded cage. Wyler, a master storyteller of Hollywood's Golden Age, deploys whimsy and melancholy with perfect balance; the pair's inevitable parting of ways remains one of the most memorable in romantic history.
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4. Dirty Dancing (1987), dir Emile Ardolino
In one of the great feel-good feminist films of the 1980s, a shy, bookish Jewish teen girl (Jennifer Grey) goes to summer camp in the sticks and meets someone who teaches her to dance and to love. Of course, that person is none other than Patrick Swayze, a heartthrob of both profound sensitivity and a tough-guy swagger. The pair also help a young woman performer at the camp who’s "in trouble" (ie pregnant) and procure her an illegal abortion, which is botched, only for Baby to call on her doctor father to come to the rescue. That the film is an upbeat romantic classic but offers such a frank portrayal of a then-still-taboo act is quietly revolutionary. Even with its layers of movie iconography, its swooning 1960s soundtrack, and – naturally – that ending, the film has a grit and emotional intelligence that transcend fantasy. Being a gawky teen girl confronted with a self-assured, sexy older guy is an identifiably overwhelming emotion; Dirty Dancing turns it into pure cinema gold.
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5. Body Heat (1981) dir Lawrence Kasdan
Few films are so genuinely redolent of summer swelter and sweat than this Floridian neo-noir, a carnal exploration of desire and its dangers. It's a truly remarkable feat of film-making for a first-time director, all the more so for its performances. Kasdan deploys a sleazebag, mustachioed William Hurt – a seedy lawyer and womaniser – into an affair with the pristine, white-clad, married Kathleen Turner, cast for her husky Lauren Bacall voice but then a relative unknown. In traditional throwback style, a murder plot develops: what else is there to do but bump off her husband? Complications ensue, largely down to Turner's wily femme fatale machinations. But most of all, Body Heat gives you the sense that hot weather makes everyone crazy – crazy for violence, crazy for sex – and that these are the results.
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6. La Piscine (1969) dir Jacques Deray
One of the quintessential summer films, La Piscine delves into the dark heart of forbidden desire and hot-blooded jealousy between four people on vacation in the French Riviera. Deray's film stars a sun-kissed, sensual Alain Delon as Jean-Paul and former wife Romy Schneider as Marianne, an impossibly beautiful couple who are unexpectedly joined in their lush vacation home by Marianne's former lover, Maurice Ronet, and his daughter, played by ingénue Jane Birkin at only 18. Erotic fantasies both old and new – and a positive cat's cradle of exchanged glances and tanned limbs – lead to violence in this Gallic classic of passion and suspense. Someone winds up dead, naturally.
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7. Adventureland (2009) dir Greg Mottola
Anyone who's ever worked a minimum wage summer job – especially one involving tourists or children – will feel the anguish of arcade games worker James, played by a deadpan and forever exasperated Jesse Eisenberg. Bored, restless, and invariably horny, he finds an object of obsession in Em, fellow employee (and Kristen Stewart, to boot). Em, however, is busy with another man, and Adventureland becomes a story as much about winning her over as it does the daily hangups of a guy who feels he's going nowhere fast. A funny and melancholic view of the temporariness of summer work, its discontents and hang ups – Adventureland builds to a surprisingly poignant conclusion. It's an ode to the aimlessness of youth, at an age where you can still get away with being directionless and even stick an indie rock soundtrack on to romanticise it.
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8. A Room with a View (1985) dir James Ivory
If you're coming to a Merchant Ivory film for romance, you’re coming for the yearning and unexpressed desire of starchily dressed Edwardians, and certainly not the hedonistic sex and suntan feel of most other summer-set romance films. Still, there's something very hot about seeing repressed, polite Brits have impolite thoughts; that's what happens to stubborn but proper young woman Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter, only 19 here) when she meets the odd, nonconformist, and strikingly handsome George Emerson (Julian Sands). They're on vacation in Italy, a generally accepted hotter-blooded nation than their native England, and thus what begins in Italy stays there: the two remain apart for the majority of the film. Based on the 1908 EM Forster novel of the same name, A Room with a View takes a tantalising amount of time to allow the two would-be lovers to even be left alone together, with a variety of characters – most memorably Lucy's chaperone cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith) – doing their damndest to ensure it doesn’t happen. It turns out that a summer romance which leaves you wanting more is a familiar theme, even to the Edwardians.
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9. Y Tu Mamá También (2001) dir Alfonso Cuaron
This Mexican road movie ménage- à-trois remains unmatched in its style, humour, and flat-out sexiness. Two irrepressibly horny teenagers, played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, happen across a gorgeous older woman (Maribel Verdú) at a party and invite her on a hedonistic road trip to the beach, hoping to get lucky. What they do not realise is that she is on the cusp of divorce from an unfaithful husband and will actually say yes. They spend the journey jockeying for her attention as she spends it teasing and playing with them both. As she draws the two men inexorably together, the pair fight, flirt, and have some major sexual epiphanies as a result of their encounter. Aside from containing a perfectly calibrated drunken dance sequence that ends in a threesome, the film is a shock of cold water in the face of conventional mores, with a progressive attitude toward open sexuality and a coolly cynical attitude about the repression of it.
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10. Pierrot Le Fou (1965) dir Jean-Luc Godard
The bourgeois Ferdinand (French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo) abandons marital life for babysitter Marianne (Anna Karina at her most beguiling) in this madcap outlaw movie with an almost Dadaist quality. Godard, the maestro of the French New Wave and here at the arguable height of his powers during his most famous period of films, works in bursts of primary colour with jump cuts galore, challenging the traditional chronology of a romantic adventure story. He moves back and forth through time between the couple's happy isolation on the road and their various quarrels, with an enigmatic voiceover throughout. Marianne, in the mould of a noir woman, is always half-abandoning and misnaming her beau, eventually leading him to his doom; but there isn't so much a plot as there is a series of knowing false-starts of plots, featuring criminal misdeeds, the Vietnam war, and even a couple of musical sequences.
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