Review Summer in France – Review on FilmTotaal

Director: Mark Chloe | Script: Roman nienke | Cast: Fockeline Ouwerkerk (Marie), Tjebbo Gerritsma (Walt), Jan Kooijman (Luuk), Jasmine Sendar (Lieke), Wendy Ruijfrok (Mia), ea | Time to play: 84 minutes | Year: 2022

Marie and Luuk are a happily married couple with two daughters. They live together with Walt and Lieke with their son. The two families are very good friends and decide to go on vacation to France together. While having a pleasant discussion, they drive down that road and arrive at a picturesque town with a beautiful house where they stay. Marie and Walt then go shopping, and suddenly the flame spreads. They kiss in the supermarket and the holidays have not started yet.

Such a situation is, of course, very unfortunate and enormously complex with complicated feelings. Marc de Chloe thinks otherwise. He heavily romanticizes adultery and completely omits all the seriousness and mixed feelings that come with it. Airy indifference is very out of place, but things are going from bad to worse.

There is a terrible message in the movie that it is incomprehensible that this has been approved. Marie and Walt finally come up with a plan to fix it. No, of course it is not a real solution, but a solution that ensures that they do not have to feel guilty and can continue with the adultery. All this still in an airy, romantic package. It must of course remain cozy and above all not too deep.

This can work well, but when it comes to adultery where children are involved, this doesn’t feel right. Unfortunately, this is not the only dubious story, the daughter of Marie and Luuk also has to make do with a story that does not consider morality very high. She finds a dog and becomes very attached to it. She then is very afraid that the owner will come looking for the dog and tries to hide the animal.

The story lacks all the complexity such themes require. Unfortunately, the characters do not clarify the why of everything either. The viewer does not get to know absolutely nothing about any character. Not what drives them, who they are, what they do, or what they want. That gives a huge feeling of emptiness, so it doesn’t matter what happens to the characters.

All the actors give a flat performance and show no deep emotions, except for a scene with Fockeline Ouwerkerk here and there. Also, you fight summer in france with a problem that many Dutch films have, and that is the excessively theatrical ABN. The dialogue seems very unnatural and ensures that no conversation sounds like real life. Both in tone and choice of words.

To reinforce this slow character of the film, the image has also been adjusted and the saturation seems to have gone up considerably. This also creates an unnatural look to the image, making it even more incredible. It’s a lot of awesome options and it takes an emotional core to do anything at all. For summer in france You don’t have to take a day off.