La belle saison (Summertime, France-Belgium 2015)

This film was recommended to me and I’m very glad I managed to watch it on BBC iPlayer. Unfortunately it will have left when you read this, but it may be streaming elsewhere. It offers a narrative about being part of the early feminist movement in France in 1971, but presents it in the form of a lesbian romance. It’s very much a product of women’s filmmaking in France, written by Catherine Corsini and Laurette Polmanss, directed by Corsini, produced by Elisabeth Perez and photographed by Jeanne Lapoirie. The narrative is straightforward. Delphine is a young woman who has grown up on a farm in the Limousin Region of South-West Central France. It’s the least populated region in France. Delphine is clear about her lesbian identity but also aware of her parents’ wish that she would marry her childhood friend Antoine. She decides to avoid confrontation by making a move to Paris, taking a job at the retail distribution company Félix Potin and by accident meets a group of women making a street protest about women’s rights. Through this chance meeting she becomes involved with Carole, a teacher of Spanish and one of a group of feminists. There is an obvious attraction between the two and Carole will eventually leave her (male) partner for Delphine. When Delphine’s father has a stroke and she must return home, Carole decides to visit her ‘on the farm’. But can they continue their affair? What’s possible in Paris might not be accepted in rural France.

I enjoyed this film a great deal. One attraction was to see Cécile de France in the role of Carole. It’s a difficult role in some ways as the character’s behaviour moves between being open and supportive and sometimes being more reckless and allowing her political aims to affect her personal relationships. I think I first saw Ms de France in L’auberge espagnole (2002) in which she plays an Erasmus student. She does not seem to age and I was surprised when I realised that she was approaching 40 when she made this film. The storytelling in La belle saison doesn’t offer some of the conventional information we might expect from a story like this, so we know little of Carole’s background. How old is she meant to be? And what kind of teaching does she actually do? Is she really a free agent, able to drop everything to join Delphine? The narrative moves so swiftly and so confidently that neither of these questions occurred to me at the time. Cécile de France may be the star but the central character is Delphine played by Izïa Higelin. Ms Higelin is both an actor and a singer and in 2015 she had relatively little feature film experience – this was just her third film (her second was Samba 2014). As with Carole, it isn’t quite clear how old Delphine is meant to be. Izïa Higelin was in her early twenties when she played the role. (The film’s Press Notes suggest that Carole is 35 and Delphine is 23, but if that is stated, I missed it.)

Why am I so obsessed with the age of the characters? I think it’s because the discourse of ‘womens rights’ in 1971 is so concerned with what women are ‘allowed’ to do. Delphine is a confident, assertive young woman in Paris, discovering that she can take part in the activities of the group which includes Carole. But back in Limousin she is aware that it is simply not done for women to act in certain ways and that if she does so she will offend her parents or alienate the other farmers (in what seems like a co-op operation), especially Antoine. Carole can be reckless, but Delphine needs to be careful – although she has the capacity to act if she thinks it through. My memories of 1971 in London seem to be more about the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front (which met for the first time at the LSE a few months after I graduated). The Women’s Movement in the UK seemed to have been around for a while and women I knew were already becoming politically active in different ways. It’s important to note that two important changes in the law in the UK were the 1967 Abortion Law Reform Act (and access to the Pill for all women via the NHS) and the 1970 Equal Pay Act meant that women in the UK were ahead of French women in these two cases.

In France in 1970 many prominent women signed the ‘Manifeste des 343 salopes’, claiming to have had an illegal abortion themselves, while also demanding the legalisation of abortion. The Bobigny affair (and trial) in 1972 saw many people including the new feminist movement (MLF), come to the support of five women (and their lawyer, Gisèle Halimi) who were tried for helping a teenage girl to have an abortion. During the May ’68 events, scholars have suggested that women engaged in the uprisings saw the positive opportunities for challenging the established sexual order, but also the negatives in terms of male activists not prepared to change their attitudes and behaviour towards female comrades. As a result, the development of MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) arose from the coming together of women’s groups established in the late 1960s. This issue is there in the views expressed by some of the women in the MLF meeting represented in La belle saison.

In 2018 I taught an evening class alongside Dr. Isabelle Vanderschelden, French Section Lead at Manchester Metropolitan University, and the historical details outlined above came from our notes. Isabelle used a clip from La belle saison and told us that:

The film’s characters are named after two emblematic feminists of the 1970s: the actress and filmmaker Delphine Seyrig and the experimental filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, who founded together in 1982 the ‘Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir’, whose main objective was to collect, produce and broadcast films and audiovisual documents on the rights, struggles and artistic creation work of women.

Isabelle also added that:

Corsini also wants to place the film in the context of social events in 2010s France – including the ‘mariage pour tous’ debates and the legislation of 2013 in France which enabled same sex marriage.

This ties in with some of the comments made by Catherine Corsini (b. 1956) in the Press Notes when asked why she chose to set Summertime in the 1970s:

I really wanted to pay tribute to feminist women, who have often been vilified, called sex-starved neurotics . . . For years I haven’t really been a true feminist myself, I almost agreed with that vision of them. But I quickly came to realise that I owed many of the benefits I live by today to these women who fought and campaigned for them. Many of them were homosexual. Thanks to this movement, they were finally able to make themselves heard. Actually, the homosexuals have really been instrumental in the emancipation of women in general. I was appealed to by the vitality, the audacity of the feminist movement. I don’t see anything quite similar today. I realised that feminism puts the human element first, and it has been the main principle in the writing of the film.

This was the first film that Catherine Corsini made with her partner Elizabeth Perez on board as producer. The film certainly celebrates the lesbian romance. The cinematography captures the beauty and joy of working in the rural landscape in ‘la belle saison’ and especially when the couple’s lovemaking is depicted outdoors as well as in the bedroom. There may be too much flesh on display for some viewers (based on some user comments I’ve seen online) but I didn’t find it gratuitous. More interesting is Carole’s relationship with Delphine’s mother Monique (Noémie Lvovsky). Carole is motivated by both simple goodwill in enjoying working with Monique, but also by her wish to promote the idea that women can run farms and be leaders in the community. This illustrates the basis for tension in the household as Delphine recognises that she can’t push too hard. The men in the film who are ‘personalised’ (as distinct from those who are physically attacked by the MLF group) are not criticised as such. They are seen as having to deal with what is happening. But the narrative isn’t really interested in them as actors in this particular story.

The narrative resolution of La belle saison is ‘open’ with an optimistic sense of looking forward but it isn’t a conventional ‘happy ending’. The film is nostalgic for those of us who lived through the period and I certainly responded to the long hair and those cheesecloth shirts that took me back to the early 1970s. (Also the Janis Joplin tracks – see the trailer below.) I can understand some of the criticisms of the film but I think that Catherine Corsini succeeded in doing what she set out to do. If you agree and you enjoy this film I would also recommend Corsini’s earlier and later films Partir (Leaving 2009) and Un amour impossible (An Impossible Love 2018), both reviewed on this blog.