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There’s a great Jonathan Richman song “That Summer Feeling” in which he describes the titular sensation not so much as something real as half-remembered, and something for which we pine in lieu of the present. It’s a nostalgia trap, in other words, that summer feeling, and it can’t help but hold back summer movies to some degree, even the good ones. Maybe the summer movie in question has a linear narrative and no flashbacks and yet, even so, the filmmakers themselves can’t help but be marked by their own past summers, nostalgia seeping into the work, whether they are conscious of it or not, which is why movies struggle to capture summer feelings as they are rather than as we recall them. All except “Adieu, Philippine,” Jacques Rozier’s 1962 directorial debut. It had all manner of difficulties in being produced and released but you wouldn’t know it to watch it, so light does it feel, turning on a love triangle between three French youths - Michel, Liliane, and Juliette. All three are played by non-actors, Jean-Claude Aimini, Yveline Céry, and Stefania Sabatini, respectively, reflecting Rozier’s method for capturing and bottling up the impossible.
As one of the French New Wave trailblazers, Rozier fuses the genre’s stylistic verve with documentary-like realism, encapsulated in an image of Liliane dancing while looking into the camera. In acknowledging the camera’s presence, she seems to virtually disappear it completely, beckoning us into the movie with her, like a reverse “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” By relying on non-actors and improvisational methods, it’s not only that nothing feels scripted, but nothing feels colored through the lens of looking back, conveying that summer feeling as so many stolen moments and fleeting, fluctuating emotions. In one breathtaking sequence, Lilianne and Juliette promenade down the sidewalk as the camera follows alongside them from what appears to be a moving car. In reacting to the real world, “Adieu, Philippine” literally documents life coming right at them in big unpredictable slices. I can’t stress it enough, this sequence is thrilling, it is absolutely thrilling.
A title card, however, tells us that “Adieu Philippine” is set in “1960, the sixth year of the Algerian War,” a harsh fact lingering throughout in the form of Michel’s mandatory military service: he must report at summer’s end. And though this would seem to ripe to add dramatic resonance and urgency, it has the opposite effect, emphasizing the ephemerality and frivolity of life. If any war leaves a mark, it’s the generational one. When Michel goes home for dinner, his parents complaining about his carefree lifestyle roll off him like water, and when Lillian’s mother notes she never went out at her daughter’s age, she replies, “You’re from a different generation.” This, however, is a tension that just lies there with no interest in resolution because it cannot be resolved; two differing points-of-view only understood when in each one; youth is only wasted on the young to the old. And when the end of “Adieu Philippine” arrives, it is slow and then all at once, as they say, Michel shipping off to war, though you’d hardly know it, Rozier gaily lingering over the trio waving goodbye. They never even decide who goes with who; it all just dissolves in the air.
