As for Félix? “It would have been great, because I love this movie,” he insists. Benjamin is excited to hopefully experience the festival in the future (his next film Lost Illusions, starring Gerard Depardieu and Xavier Dolan, is expected to take him there). The film had its cinema run in France already and is rolling out throughout film festivals around the world, albeit mostly digitally. The film, in all of its sun-soaked, Francophone glory, was set to premiere in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a lustrous first step for a film indebted to the sea-lined coasts of France. When we met for the first time, we felt the same way about each other.”
“We spent every night together before the shoot the streets. “Like in the movie, Félix never had a motorcycle and I did,” Benjamin says. In the film, Alex wraps his arms around David’s waist as they take a motorcycle trip from a carnival to the seafront, recklessly weaving in between traffic, seeking a thrill. To pin down the connection the pair of them share, Félix and Benjamin spent time together, and worked out the ways in which their own relationship could combine with that of their characters. One so different to the one we’re in today: more colourful.” “It was funny to see a generation I thought I knew, but didn’t. When I listened to those songs, I understood why they could dance and feel like this at that time.” There was a lot of The Cure, Phil Collins, Michael Jackson and Bananarama in his playlists. “I was watching the movies that Alex could have watched, and listening to what could have been his favourite songs.
Often via the tastes of his own mother, he soaked up the culture of that era before he got to the set. Summer of 85 is as giddy as a first love, like an elevated, exuberant queer soap opera.įélix too trusted in François’ vision, but was fascinated by the setting in which the film took place: a small seaside community in Normandy in the mid-80s. So here is the merging of all of his ideas: something sensitive and playful, dark but not so dark that you can’t find the glimmers of silliness within it. But he also knows restraint and nuances surrounding subjects that require such treatment: he made a star from Marine Vacth in the teen sex worker thriller Jeune et Jolie, but also crafted a fine artist biopic, Frantz, in 2016. He can be a sexual satirist: 2017’s L’Amant Double was a wild and erotic exploration of a woman falling in love with two twin therapists. When they first met, shortly after Félix had been cast, François told Benjamin that his domineering character would be akin to a scorpion, almost preying upon this boy he had enraptured: “It’s this animal that’s beautiful, and for three or four hours it won’t move,” Benjamin explains, “but he also has the potential to kill.” It’s the perfect descriptor for David and how Benjamin plays him: he's a volatile character who’s so easy to fall for that you know his mere existence could eventually lead to his lover’s demise.įrançois Ozon has a tendency to take a subject matter that may otherwise be fairly run of the mill, and skew it with a strangeness unfamiliar to his viewers. That Benjamin, as smooth and cool as his character, chooses not to have Instagram (“I think being mysterious is better!” he says) is a testament to how greatly he fits into David’s shoes. The busy, braggadocious murmurs of inner city Paris can be heard behind Benjamin’s voice, more projected and enigmatic, spliced with the sputters and sparks of a cigarette lighter. When Félix answers his call, he seems docile and smart. In real life, their personalities, when they speak to us over the phone, are reflective of their own characters. As Alex, Félix is a comforting presence malleable and sweet, dazzled by his darker and wiser counterpart.
They are Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin, who play Alex and David respectively. Harnessing this vibrant and vast arc required the talents of two young French actors whose naturalistic screen tendencies would shine through - even if neither had grappled with material like this before. You see it as a story of friendship and first love told in several swapping timeframes, building a sun-soaked and tragic portrait of what it’s like to be young, queer and infatuated by someone you barely know, so much so that the loss of them will drive you to insanity. We know from the offset of the film that David is now dead - but the reason behind Alex’s interrogation in the incident is not revealed until much later. It’s a name that’s uttered almost constantly by Alex in a thick French accent throughout the movie, both in lovestruck exasperation and mournful longing.