Cinema about sex is often enriched by summer settings: escalating heat can place bodies into increasingly erotic orbits as the seeming eternity of canicular days are pit against seasonal ephemerality. While fleeting yet formative attachments are the nucleus of countless films that centre sexual self-discovery, considerably underexplored are the unenticing experiences of sexual alienation and turmoil during the warmest time of year. The title of Québec filmmaker Denis Côté’s most recent feature, Un été comme ça, suggests the generic frothiness of a hot fling, but turns on this conceit to delve into the highly specific experiences of three women in a remote treatment program for hypersexuality and sexual trauma.
Across Côté’s varied career is a (2010) and (2019), Côté’s chasmic spaces are also inhabited by social outcasts and misunderstood subjects, such as the recently incarcerated queer couple of (2013), the mysteriously withdrawn wife in (2016), and the solitary wanderer of (2019). These cryptic if subtly rebellious protagonists form the connective tissue of a filmography that probes the dynamics that erupt from the refusal of normative social structures like marriage, domesticity, wellness, and community. Its unsurprising, then, that Côté’s previous feature, (2021), slyly references the moralizing and repressive Progressive-era sexual education movement of the same name. Yet while raised interesting questions about sex and gender, its provocations—delivered between characters standing at a distance in a field—were buried in a formal experiment that often felt like endurance art.
