1 Red Dust
Victor Fleming, 1932
No amount of resourceful set dressing can convince us that this poky MGM backlot is a perspiring slab of French Indochina in monsoon season. That’s the job of the three leads in this deliciously humid love triangle, as rubber plantation manager Clark Gable is caught between randy hooker Jean Harlow (of course) and buttoned-up, married Mary Astor just as the rains begin to fall. Cue all the pre-Code steam the trio can muster, with Harlow least bothered by the heat. “I’m not used to sleeping nights anyway,” she smirks saucily, before prancing off to bathe nude in a barrel.
2 Summertime
David Lean, 1955
Anyone who has been to Venice in peak summer recently will know that this rapturous lonely-hearts romance could hardly take place there today. Katharine Hepburn’s briefly footloose Ohio secretary would scarcely register Rossano Brazzi’s amorous eye contact amid the hordes of handbag hawkers and snaking queues of Crocs-shod tourists in the Piazza San Marco. Then again, this is a film that knows better than most the impermanence of the ideal: David Lean’s favourite of his own works, it’s as poetic and heartsore an ode to the pleasures of fleeting emotional connection as the more celebrated Brief Encounter.
3 Smiles of a Summer Night
Ingmar Bergman, 1955
For a director frequently held up as the pin-up for stony Scandinavian gloom, Ingmar Bergman had something of a yen for the warmer months. This space could as easily have been taken by Summer Interlude, his gorgeous reflection on a ballerina’s tragedy-capped holiday fling, or Summer With Monika, in which a coastal escape turns to soured reality as the air cools. But how to resist this joyous romantic comedy, in which four couples whirl between desire, conflict and consummation on the shortest night of the year? If only Strindberg’s Miss Julie had instead found herself in this Swedish country manor on Midsummer’s Eve.
4 Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
Whether you choose to view Godard’s wild, slapstick-fuelled fable of amour fou as a summer romance or not – to borrow its own words, it’s “tender and cruel”, and built on foxy trickery – there’s little denying that it’s romantically summery, driven by rash decisions made in the heat of the moment. The French Riviera, where married Parisian media type Ferdinand and makeshift moll Marianne escape via a blithe crime spree, usually appears on screen in genteel pastels, not the bursting-hot primary colours it does here. Every frame suggests you might singe your fingers if you touch the screen.
5 The Green Ray
(Eric Rohmer, 1986)
Rohmer’s own A Summer’s Tale, made 10 years later, is probably a better love story: The Green Ray, loosely inspired by Jules Verne’s romantic 1882 novel, isn’t a love story at all, but a story, most profoundly and searchingly, about love. Singleton Delphine begins and revises her summer vacation too many times for any relationship to take root. As she flits restlessly from Paris to Cherbourg to the Alps, it’s not clear what or whom she is looking for, until a chance encounter in a Biarritz train station offers a clue. A gentle critique of the false associations we’ve attached to the season, it’s a pretty perfectly constructed summer tale in itself.
6 The Man in the Moon
Robert Mulligan, 1991
Robert Mulligan knew the elegiac nature of an American summer: there’s To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, but he also made a pretty good lunge for this list with the liltingly scored wartime weepie Summer of ’42. His final and most undervalued film, The Man in the Moon, combines the latter’s Rockwell romanticism with a measure of Harper Lee’s tough love – it conveys the full, fluttery thrill of a 14-year-old girl’s first kiss and, less expectedly the stark, searing pain of affections swiftly transferred. The 1957 summer, an especially honey-dipped Louisiana special, enhances the first experience as intensely as it aggravates the second.
7 Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight
Richard Linklater, 1995/2004/2013
Celine and Jesse, the great imperfect pairing of modern cinema, talk about everything but the weather across the three films that make up Richard Linklater’s time-lapse relationship study, yet theirs is a relationship that seems essentially activated by summer itself. Certainly, they’d never have whiled away a whole Viennese night together in less balmy climes, reconvening in the less impulsive month of December, as initially planned, might have ended the whole thing. There’s a flipside, though: by the time they’re holidaying in Greece with their daughters, 18 years later, the sun actively heats their squabbles. An uncertain autumn beckons.
8 Brokeback Mountain
(Ang Lee, 2005)
Cinema boasts more romantic midsummer night trysts than Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist’s fast, fumbling first fuck in a cramped, remote tent, but few quite as consequential. There’s no feverish, heat-induced irrationality motivating them – for one thing, those Wyoming hillside nights get pretty darn cold – but a deep-rooted emotional need that neither man quite understands. Their intercourse ushers in a summer of rough, unspoken love that can neither be extended nor repeated – however many fishing trips they take later in married life – with two bloodied cowboy shirts its only souvenir.
9 The Myth of the American Sleepover
David Robert Mitchell, 2010
Summer romance on screen may not be the exclusive preserve of teenagers, but given the unstructured, unsupervised nature of the season, they get to make more of it than most. If Hollywood’s teen movie annals are to be believed, summertime is a veritable marathon of coltish sexual activity, which is why they aren’t to be believed, and why Mitchell’s wistful, loving portrait of youths awkwardly at rest seems closer to the truth. The suburban Michigan air here is heavy with pool chlorine and chastely frustrated crushes; childhood may be over by the next school term.
10 Tabu
Miguel Gomes, 2012
Gomes’s rather odd imagination appears to flourish in the heat – before Tabu came Our Beloved Month of August, which delighted in Portugal’s communal rituals of that month. This sustained swoon of a film is less specifically dedicated to the season, though its emotions surely wouldn’t run so woozily high in a different setting. Detailing an illicit affair in colonial Africa, folded in sheets of ephemeral memory, Gomes’s summer is drenched in sweat, cicadas and Portuguese language covers of the Ronettes – a hypnotic, inhibition-overriding combination. The film’s present-day sections, set in rain-spritzed Lisbon, may as well be Arctic by comparison.
