Un Invincible Été

26/10/2025 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Un Invincible Été: A Tender Coming-of-Age Story

A Brief but Powerful Exploration of Teenage Desire and Self-Discovery

Arnaud Dufeys’ short film Un Invincible Été captures a pivotal moment in adolescence with remarkable sensitivity and restraint. In just a brief runtime, the film manages to convey the complexity of teenage sexuality, vulnerability, and the sometimes uncomfortable gap between expectation and reality.

The premise is deceptively simple: 16-year-old Clément (Vadiel Gonzalez Lardued), bored and restless during a hot summer evening by the pool, decides tonight’s the night he’ll lose his virginity. Armed with Grindr and a lie about his age, he arranges to meet 24-year-old Naël. What follows is a delicate portrait of anticipation, nervous energy, and ultimately, a different kind of awakening than Clément expected.

What makes this film particularly effective is its refusal to sensationalize. Writer Nicolas Moulin crafts a narrative that understands the urgency and single-mindedness of teenage desire while also acknowledging the emotional complexity beneath it. The film’s turning point—when Clément encounters a body “completely different from Naël’s”—becomes not just about physical intimacy but about accepting reality versus fantasy, and the messy, imperfect nature of growing up.

The performances are naturalistic and unforced, particularly Gonzalez Lardued’s portrayal of Clément’s mix of bravado and uncertainty. Dufeys directs with a light touch, letting moments breathe and trusting his audience to read between the lines. The summer setting—the pool, the heat, the isolation—creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere that perfectly captures that strange liminal space of adolescence.

Un Invincible Été doesn’t provide easy answers or moralize about its subject matter. Instead, it offers an honest, empathetic glimpse into a formative moment, reminding us that coming of age is rarely about grand revelations but rather small, sometimes awkward moments of truth that shape who we become.

A thoughtful, mature short that lingers in the mind long after its brief runtime.

Un invincible été

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Summer Friends [2021] – Movie Review

01/09/2025 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Summer Friends (2021) – Between Tides and First Feelings

Maxime Hermet’s short film Summer Friends takes us into the fragile, in-between world of adolescence, where friendships stretch and shift under the weight of new encounters.

Tom and Ellis, both fifteen, have known no summer without each other. Their days are spent at sea, casting lines into the water, their bond built on an ease that requires little talk. Their friendship feels as steady and unbroken as the horizon they face together.

When Lucie arrives in their small village for the holidays, that horizon tilts. Played by Syrine Conesa, she is at once familiar and new—an outsider who draws them out of their habits. What begins as idle company slowly takes on a different shape, carrying with it the electricity of first intimacies and the quiet fear of change.

Jean Aviat and Tim Rousseau embody Tom and Ellis with a raw naturalism, letting glances and pauses do most of the speaking. Hermet resists dramatics, instead allowing the Summer Friends silences, the play of light on water, and the passing days to carry the story forward. The film is less concerned with what happens than with the unspoken tension of what might.

Summer Friends runs under twenty minutes, but its images linger. It leaves the aftertaste of a season remembered: the sense of time both endless and fleeting, the discovery that friendship can expand and fracture in the same breath, and the knowledge that even the smallest summer can leave permanent marks.

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August (Août) – Movie Review

08/08/2025 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Review: August (Août) – A Fever Dream of Queer Youth and Unspoken Longing
By David McFarlane

Aout or August There’s something elusive, almost spectral, about August (Août), Louis Thines’ short film about youth, identity, and the electric charge of uncertain desire. Like the haze of a sun-drenched French summer, it is beautiful to look at but often slips through your fingers the moment you try to hold onto it.

Thines, who writes, directs, and stars, gives us Louis — a young man drifting between adolescence and adulthood, unsure whether the world he’s entering will accept the parts of him still forming. He visits his best friend Roxane in the south of France, and we are drawn immediately into the languid rhythms of long days, warm light, and the emotionally loaded quiet between people who are not quite saying what they feel.

Enter Jérémy (played with understated magnetism by Jérémy Papallardo), a stranger met at a party who seems to reflect all that Louis is unsure of in himself. Their interactions, captured through soft, intimate cinematography, shimmer with possibility. It’s less about dialogue and more about proximity — bodies not touching, glances exchanged, silences that thrum with meaning.

And then — a kiss. Or rather, the suggestion of one. A brief, pivotal moment when Jérémy leans in and Louis recoils, not with revulsion, but confusion. We hold our breath. And then… nothing. The moment vanishes, like a wave that never breaks.

It’s in this unresolved space that August both finds its mood and loses its momentum. The film never quite allows us to know what Louis wants, or even who he is — and perhaps that’s the point. But while ambiguity can be powerful, here it feels more like absence. As a viewer, I felt not only suspended but slightly abandoned.

Technically, though, August is stunning. From the golden palette of late afternoons to the sound design that captures the lazy hum of a southern summer, Thines has crafted a world I believed in completely. Every frame feels lived-in, every gesture natural, every moment held just long enough to suggest there is more beneath the surface. Aout or August

But narrative, like desire, needs direction. And here, August hesitates when it most needs to speak. The queer experience, especially in youth, is often defined by silences — those moments when we don’t say what we feel, or don’t know how. Thines understands this deeply. But in the end, I wanted a little more certainty, even if it was just emotional honesty.

August is a film about the in-between — between boyhood and manhood, friendship and love, self-assurance and fear. It is gorgeously observed, but narratively restrained. Whether that restraint is poetic or simply withholding will depend on the viewer. For me, it was a beautiful near-miss: tender, evocative, and frustratingly incomplete.

Still, I’d rather a filmmaker risk saying too little than too much. And I’ll be watching Thines’ future work with great interest. He has an eye — and a heart — worth paying attention to.

Aout or August

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