An intimate and touching story told through the eyes of 15-year-old Fanny (Kaya Toft Loholt) my eternal summer (my eternal summer) follows Fanny as she spends an eventful holiday awaiting the death of her terminally ill mother Carine (Maria Rossin). In delicately balanced scenes filled with poignant details, Danish director Sylvia Le Fanu (making her feature debut) and her co-writer Mads Linde Knudsen craft a stoic, humorous and He often drinks a lot of wine in an elegantly decorated room.
After premiering in San Sebastian’s New Directors section, the play took a short break to screen in another competition section at the BFI London Film Festival. Its accessible emotional depth could help it win distribution outside the Nordic region.
my eternal summer
bottom line
Warm night, sad smile.
Place: San Sebastian Film Festival (New Directors)
Throw: Kaja Toft Loholt, Maria Rosin, Anders Moslin, Jasper Cruz Svabo
director: Silvia Le Fanu
screenwriter: Sylvia Le Fanu, Max Lind Knudsen
1 hour 45 minutes
While Fanny is in nearly every scene of the film, the camera occasionally leaves to spend some alone time with Fanny’s parents, Karin and Johann (Anders Mossling), as they deal with the logistics and imminent arrival of Karin. Inner turmoil. But Fanny’s point of view is so ingrained that it mimics children living happily without any idea of how their parents feed them, and the sparse script never even tells us what exactly the couple does for a living – though Karin throughout The piano playing scene and later talking about her students suggest that she is either a musician or a music teacher, while John’s dry humor and the way he carries a book about the Gulag suggest that he may be one famous scholar.
The point is that the family of three are spending their last holiday together in their summer house, a charming seaside cottage some distance from Copenhagen. No one is talking about work at this point. In fact, not many conversations took place at all as the trio settled into the dusty house, accepted transport for a hospital bed (as Karin could no longer climb stairs) and arranged for a home visit from the district nurse for her final days.
As a dutiful only child, Fanny does what she can to help, but she’s still a teenager and therefore prone to all the usual self-absorption. Her frustration with the cabin’s poor Wi-Fi signal is a sure sign of her restlessness as she has to deal with a deep sense of sadness at the loss of her mother, but also boredom.
Her relationship with her boyfriend Jamie (Jasper Cruise Swabb), a lovable but gloomy guy, takes up a lot of her mental bandwidth. After a brief visit early in the trip, Fanny somewhat irrationally believes that his subsequent lack of contact is like a ghost, when in reality he may just be busy with sport and life back in the capital. She writes a really bad self-pity poem about their last goodbye and reads it to Karin, who of course at first thinks it’s a poem about her own impending departure. When she found out it was actually about Jamie, she looked both a little unhappy and a little amused.
These carefully observed details appear throughout, revealing the complexity, fallibility, and kindness of ordinary people. At one point, Fanny tried an online personality test and asked her family which of a series of three adjectives best described her: “serious, honest, loyal,” or “loving, smart, thoughtful,” for example. ? John dismissed the whole reductive con, calling her “bossy,” and he was right. But Fanny is also all of the above, and once she stops being obsessed with Jamie, she feels angry, confused, and ultimately deeply empathetic.
As Karin’s condition slowly worsens and friends say goodbye at a final birthday party, the poor child goes through all the stages of grief at once. In the end, she was strong enough to do the right thing for her parents.
The subject matter alone is enough to bring tears to viewers’ eyes, but what’s particularly impressive about Le Fanu’s direction is its lack of pathos. Instead, she focused on the daily rituals — the murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the exhausting feeling that lingers for hours, days and weeks as you wait for someone to die.
Jan Bastian Munoz Marthinsen’s bright, clean lighting sits patiently on either side of the characters without drawing any undue attention. The same goes for Patricio Fraile’s score and Frederik Lehmann Mikkelson’s sound design, which work closely together to blend the sighs of the cello with the drifting The sound of waves mingling towards the shore. The performances from the entire cast, especially Toft Loholt, Rosin and Moslin, are equally perfect.
