Summer Games
An impressively mature coming-of-age film
SCREENINGS:
Friday, September 9, 8:45 p.m.
AMC 3 (10 Dundas Street East)
Saturday, September 10, 9:45 p.m.
AMC 4 (10 Dundas Street East)
Friday, September 16, 10 a.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 (350 King Street West)
Making a coming-of-age film is tricky business, especially if the target audience has already come of age. Too serious and it’s dull; too wistful and you’re left soaked in schmaltz. Summer Games gets the balance right, dovetailing the story of Nic (Armando Condolucci), a misfit adolescent on vacation with his family, with the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, underscoring the hereditary cycles of abuse and redemption that entwine them.
At a small camping resort, Nic and his younger brother begin palling around with some other young kids, including Marie (Fiorella Campanella), a pretty young girl who catches Nic’s eye (and, early on, his fist). The kids happen upon a mostly abandoned garden shed, where they play a variation on hide-and-seek where the captive players are subjected to the whims of their captor. There’s a twitchy, pre-teen sado-sexuality here that recalls Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game, which Colla handles masterfully. Likewise, scenes between Nic’s abusive father (Antonio Merone) and long-suffering mother (Alessia Barela) unfold with remarkably even oscillations between tenderness and terror. The soundtrack may drive the atmospherics a bit too deliberately, and the repeating emotional rhythms achieve a kind of dragging staccato (until the affecting conclusion), but Summer Games emerges as a remarkably mature picture exceeding its otherwise rote tweenage-romance setup.