Normandy's coast in the 1980s is where François Ozon sets Summer of 85, a French drama released in 2020. Across 97 minutes the director stays close to a sixteen-year-old named Alexis during the holiday that changes how he understands friendship, risk and himself.
What is Summer of 85 about?
School is out and Alexis, sixteen, has a whole season ahead of him in a seaside resort town. He takes a small boat out alone, it capsizes, and he comes close to drowning before another young man, David, reaches him and gets him safely back to shore. From that rescue a friendship forms with startling speed. David seems to be exactly the companion Alexis has long imagined: someone to make promises with, to head out with on the water or on a motorbike, to live with at full tilt. Running under all of it is a darker preoccupation, since Alexis is a teenager fascinated by death in the abstract way of someone who has never had to face it. The story is told as his own account of those weeks and of how they shaped the person he became.
About the cast
Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin head the cast list, followed by Philippine Velge, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Melvil Poupaud, Isabelle Nanty, Laurent Fernandez and Aurore Broutin. The weight of the drama falls on its young performers, while the more experienced names fill in the adult world that surrounds the teenagers and watches their summer from a distance.
Context & significance
Coming-of-age stories often lean on a single season, and this one makes the device explicit in its title. The period setting does a lot of work: a resort town before mobile phones, where teenagers find each other at the harbour or on the road rather than on a screen, and where a chance meeting can reorganise an entire holiday. The drama is intimate in scale, concerned with two young people and the intensity of a first great attachment, and it treats adolescent feeling seriously instead of nostalgically. For Persian-speaking audiences, the title is offered with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched in whichever way feels more comfortable.
Watching Summer of 85 on Ktime
Summer of 85 can be streamed on K-Time, where the interface, search and title pages are presented in Farsi for Iranians living abroad. Reading this page costs nothing and needs no sign-in; starting playback does require logging in to a K-Time account. Choose the dubbed track or the subtitled original once the film is open.