Berlin Review: Denis Cote’s ‘That Kind of Summer’
15.02.2022 - 04:19
/ deadline.com
An isolated house in the country, a small tribe of peculiar characters mostly keeping a wary distance from each other: That Kind of Summer (Un Ete Comme Ca) is a film set up perfectly for the pandemic era. The bonus zinger is that the house is a live-in retreat for supposedly, or maybe just possibly, recovering sex addicts. Nobody leaves, and everyone talks dirty. Denis Cote, the prolific Quebecois provocateur, must have been hugging himself when he thought of that one.
Cote’s previous feature, made during Canada’s strictest lockdown, was wittily titled Social Hygiene. It was filmed on a hillside, where a succession of different women hurled abuse at a man who had offended all of them; he looked and sounded as if he had just wandered on set from a Dostoevsky novel. By comparison, That Kind of Summer is quite conventional. At least we know the sex addiction program lasts just 26 days, so there will be a beginning, middle and end.
There is some thematic continuity, however. Once again, a bevy of women surrounds a single, seemingly hapless man. Three inmates – all young women, barely out of adolescence – are supervised by Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle), a German academic who was treated for sex addiction herself once. Mathilde (Marie-Claude Guerin), the program’s formidably sinister founder, is taking a year off from running the retreat directly because she is heavily pregnant, but she keeps popping up – ostensibly to make Founders’ Day speeches but clearly also desperately missing whatever perverse pleasure it gives her.
The final woman in this edifice is Diane (Josee Deschenes), a cook who clearly wonders what kind of madhouse this is. Then there is the single man in this hothouse: Sami (Samir Guesmi), a youth worker who tells
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