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
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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