Abstract:
What Will Summer Bring is one of those films that seeks to impress with its cinematographic device of an alleged documentary made from videos found on a camera and to question us about the genre.
Is the objective or thesis of the film to question the fundamentals of credibility that every documentary deserves? Is it discussing the tension between images and text, between images and their interpretation?
If so, the film ends up failing as a story: its premises gradually undermine the viewer's interest in the story that is intended to be articulated between the text and the images. The doubts that it generates as a documentary alienate the viewer, who ends up oscillating between disbelief and apathy, despite the objective interest that some images and situations and the supposed thesis of the entire film can generate.
Review:
Winner of the award for Best Film of the Argentine Competition of BAFICI 2021
The story is as follows: the filmmaker travels to France to spend the European winter with his girlfriend, who is doing a master's degree there. He buys a camera and it turns out that it contains videos belonging to the previous owner, named Charles Louvet. The director manages to contact Charles by email and asks him for permission to use this material in a movie. The French not only agrees, but begins to send explanatory emails about the videos.
Ignacio Ceroi's film, then, is made up of this material, with a voice-over that reads Louvet's explanations and some material from Ceroi's own journey.
The question that immediately arises is what is true in all this. Images of Louvet (credited as one of the photographers) range from walks in Montepellier with his dogs to images from the Cameroonian separatist war, where Charles went for a temporary job at the French Embassy.
Does Louvet exist? Are all the videos his or does the director include others that are awarded to him? Are the first person texts from French? Is it simply a found footage mockumentary? Is the objective or thesis of the film to question the fundamentals of credibility that every documentary deserves? Is it discussing the tension between images and text, between images and their interpretation?
Lately, "serious" documentaries have been forcing the limits of their credibility contract with the viewer, their credibility and their staging, sometimes with highly debatable interventions that bring them closer to reality, casting doubt on the spontaneity or veracity of what that is shown (as in The Mole Agent or The Carnival). In other cases, and generally from the humor side, the mockumentary that integrates some real archive materials with invented situations and the confusion that this generates works very well, as in the case of The Red Star.
But the main danger that stalks some documentary filmmakers is narcissism and delight in the effect that the cinematographic device they assemble can create in a cinema designed for festivals. In some cases, the result is brilliant and powerful, as in Esquirlas, with the Rio Tercero tragedy seen from its director's family videos.
But in What Will Summer Bring , the doubts that are generated are so many that they distance the viewer from the first-person story of the supposed protagonist (Louvet) and his adventures (the monotony of the voice-over does not help either). If there is an underlying humorous intention, frankly I did not perceive it, or only in a few moments. What is seen ends up being a staged and apocryphal story that does not hold interest because its premises boycott its dramatic progress as history.
Ceroi seems convinced, apparently, that what is interesting about his film should be the doubts it generates, on the one hand, and the objective interest of his film material on the other. And it worked for him with the BAFICI 2021 jury, which consecrated this film as the winner of the Official Argentine Competition.
In short: if the objective or thesis of the film is to question the foundations of the credibility that a documentary deserves, the film ends up failing as a story: its premises gradually end up undermining the viewer's interest in the story that is intended to be articulated between text and images. The viewer ends up oscillating between disbelief and apathy, despite the objective interest that some of these images and situations can generate.
