In a Corsican village nestled in the mountains, everyone experiences summer in his or her own way: children play, teenagers flirt, and the elders comment on the passage of time at their local bar. In the August heat, it doesn’t take long for tensions to rise as one family struggles to keep grudges from bubbling to the surface. Sometimes a spark is all that is needed to set the maquis alight.
Actor and theatre director, Pascal Tagnati, makes his debut feature with a cinéma vérité narrative that coasts around a tiny Corsican town. His screenplay of vignettes (occasionally provocative) interweaves locals and vacationers having separate experiences with some characters occasionally overlapping.
In between working, Franje (Jean-Christoph Folly) hangs with a group of friends and deals with personal issues. A couple, Bastien and Theo, are shown having a tough time dealing with Theo’s inconsolable outlook that he’s a failure in life. Next, two girls are discussing power dynamics in a relationship and humorously disagree on monogamy. And finally, a sheepherder gets into a nasty land dispute with local rivals.
My favorite scene is a one-sided conversation between Franje and the elderly woman he cares for. She goes on about austerity, racism, and the changing political climate of Europe. She seems to sum up all of the global issues in one long-winded but fascinating soliloquy. Franje is the only Black person in the village and has to manage his deceased father’s ties to a casino.
For a debut, Tagnati displays a confident eye for pacing and angles. Every conversation or musical interlude is full of movement while the camera remains stagnant in a corner similar to a performance on stage. The locations are right out of a postcard and the script is an insightful look into the lives and customs of a place rarely captured on screen. At first, I was expecting a meandering story, but nearly every scene and conversation lead to a satisfying conclusion or revelation for its main characters.
Now I just need to book a trip to Corsica!
“I comete: A Corsican Summer” recently premiered at the 2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam
