From Rohmer’s young people talking themselves into getting lost to Guadagnino’s villas warmed by desire, from Agnès Varda’s flowers opening under the sun to François Ozon’s pools slowly turning dark, summer in these films is never entirely innocent. Sometimes the sun begins a love affair. Sometimes it conceals a small disaster on its way, making everything look beautiful for just a little longer. Think of the opening scenes of summer films. Someone steps off a train at a station and leaves a suitcase on a platform heated by the sun. Soon after, the shutters of a rental house, closed for months, are opened, and the sea that had appeared and disappeared in the car window along the way suddenly fills the room. Shirts are thrown onto the bed. The protagonist does not yet know what is about to happen. We, however, sense that this arrival marks more than the beginning of a holiday. In cinema, summer is a place where the usual rules of life are suspended for a while. People look at the clock less and at one another a little longer. Just when they think they are thinking less, everything they have postponed throughout the year begins to rise quietly to the surface. Mornings begin with light coming through open windows. After a few lengths in the water, someone falls asleep with hair still damp as the midday sun grows heavy overhead. By evening the house comes back to life, espadrilles are put on, and everyone walks to dinner as though nothing has happened all day. Yet in the summer films of Southern Europe, the real story begins precisely when nothing appears to be happening. Within a few days, the villa, the beach and the town square become the boundaries of an entire universe. Bicycle routes are memorised, the same tables are taken at the same cafés. Summer does not simply bring people closer together. It also reduces the distance available for escape. Éric Rohmer’s films map out this imaginary country. Some are not even geographically set in Southern Europe. Pauline à la plage takes place in Normandy, while Conte d’été wanders along the coast of Brittany. Yet they all belong to the same summer territory, one where people try to talk their way across the distance between desire and what they believe they deserve. In Rohmer’s world, no one simply says, “I like you,” and leaves it there. They define love, deliver small lectures on fidelity, insist that they are not jealous while never taking their eyes off the person at the next table. In Pauline à la plage, fifteen-year-old Pauline watches the gap between what adults say about love and what they actually do. In Conte d’été, Gaspard waits in Dinard for Léna, who is not quite his girlfriend, while walking with Margot, flirting with Solène, and falling in love with a different version of himself in every possibility. In the scene where they sit talking in front of blue-and-white beach cabins, another director might raise the music. Rohmer simply adds another sentence. The crew was so small that Melvil Poupaud later compared the shoot to a family making a holiday film together. In La Collectionneuse, too, the villa is both setting and home to the crew, as if the camera had only been switched on when it felt like it throughout the summer. In Le Rayon vert, Delphine drifts from one holiday plan to another. She carries that particular loneliness of being unable to enjoy yourself while everyone else seems to be having fun. If you are unhappy in a place where you are supposed to be happy, the unhappiness becomes twice as visible. The green flash at the end of the film feels less like a natural phenomenon than a tiny miracle, the moment Delphine manages to breathe in time with the world again. Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse had already assembled all the elements of South-of-France summer cinema by 1958. A villa on the Riviera, a playful father, a young lover, a girl who is far too clever, and a plan that cannot be undone. As Jean Seberg’s Cécile walks across the terrace in a blue shirt over her red swimsuit, the film seems to be photographing happiness itself. Preminger renders the Parisian present in black and white, while the summer Cécile remembers appears in saturated colour. Colour becomes not the language of joy, but of lost time. The brightest images are already behind her. Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur also seduces us first with beauty. Family picnics, flower-filled fields, luminous yellows and pinks. Yet inside this confectionery palette is a cold question. François loves his wife, and he loves another woman too, and he cannot understand why happiness should not simply be added to happiness. Varda refuses the dark skies melodrama would normally demand. The sun continues to shine. The flowers continue to bloom as though nothing has happened. The fact that Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot, married in real life, play the couple makes the naturalness of the family images even more unsettling. Then the endless blue of the sea is compressed into the frame of a swimming pool. If the sea represents freedom in Mediterranean cinema, the pool suggests control. A small world, cleaned, contained and absorbed into architecture. In La Piscine, Alain Delon and Romy Schneider move slowly around it while old relationships circulate through the same closed system. Everyone is tanned, beautiful and uneasy. In Barbet Schroeder’s More, Ibiza at first seems like a place where one might begin again, with its whitewashed houses, motorcycles and Pink Floyd songs. For Stefan, who follows Estelle to the island, love turns into addiction and bohemian freedom into a cycle with no exit. The songs are not music laid over the film from outside. They seep into the house from radios and parties, becoming another character. The cruelty of More lies in refusing to hide collapse in darkness. The sea is still blue. The house is still white. Luca Guadagnino carries this inheritance to Pantelleria in A Bigger Splash. Between Tilda Swinton’s silent rock star Marianne and Ralph Fiennes’s Harry, a man who fills every empty space with his voice, jealousy sits just beneath the sun. In François Ozon’s Swimming Pool, the pool becomes a third character, drawing out the repressed imagination of the writer played by Charlotte Rampling. In Call Me by Your Name, pools give way to rivers, fountains, peach orchards and long lunches. Elio reads, rides his bicycle and pretends not to care where Oliver is while constantly looking for him. Desire is measured by the distance between two bicycles. Summer romances in these films are often beautiful precisely because they are going to end. The villa will close. Swimsuits will be packed before they are completely dry. By the time September arrives, no one will be quite the same person. The return of Françoise Sagan’s story to the screen through Durga Chew-Bose shows that this language is still alive. In the new Bonjour Tristesse, shot in Cassis, Cécile is played by Lily McInerny and Anne by Chloë Sevigny. Starting from the idea that people always take books with them on holiday, Chew-Bose even commissioned fictional books for the characters to read. The book Cécile carries, Claudia, takes its name from Monica Vitti’s character in L’Avventura, a small and elegant conversation between Mediterranean summer cinema and its own past. The costumes, the books and the silences inside the house may change, but the danger remains the same. The order created by adults can still be unsettled by a single look from a young woman. In this world, the holiday is always something like the final rehearsal for the quiet end of innocence. Perhaps what makes these films so irresistible is not that they show perfect holidays, but that they understand a holiday can be as complicated as life itself. Years later, we remember the atmosphere more than the plot. Jean Seberg’s red swimsuit, Rohmer’s striped beach cabins, Varda’s flowers, Tilda Swinton’s silence by the pool, Elio’s room warmed by the sun. In summer cinema, it is only when the light begins to tilt that we finally understand what has happened to us.