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Summer of 85 (2020), François Ozon

QUEER ARCHIVE Fri Jun 20 2025 17:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Summer of 85 (2020) — The Barthescore Gay Mixtape of Mourning

“Call Me by Your Name” and “Heartstopper” can shove their queer-softcore baby love arcs(asses) where the sun don’t shine. Summer of 85 is that BITCH. It’s a Taylor Swift shading Kanye kind of girlboss move. Ozon said, “You want queer love?” and served death, discourse, and dick in equal measure.

This isn’t a pastel-filtered BL fantasy. It’s Thanatos with a mixtape. Ozon didn’t come here to aestheticize queer love—he came to theorize it. Summer of 85 is what happens when you put Barthes, Edelman, and Muñoz in a blender and press “serve chilled.”

Alexis isn’t just a narrator—he’s a theorist. This film isn’t about what happened. It’s about how he remembers it. That’s Barthes 101. Every glance, every frame is filtered through A Lover’s Discourse: a book of fragments, obsession, mourning, and gay poetic suffering. The narration is not a plot device; it’s a eulogy.

This film is Barthes in drag. Like, actual drag. Ozon reads Barthes and says, “Let me turn this into a beachy necro-romantic gay summer thriller with a dash of courtroom drama and homoerotic French tension.” And yes, he succeeds.

Let’s talk theory. Because this film is laced with it:

The power play is fierce: David is hot, golden, and elusive. Alexis is anxious, fragile, and always watching. But who controls the narrative? Alexis. Who romanticizes David? Alexis. Who buries him and mythologizes him? Alexis. This isn’t a love story. It’s a performance of grief. A documentation of obsession.

Sex isn’t romantic. It’s ritualistic. Ozon doesn’t direct with sentimentality. He directs with precision—like a scalpel. There is joy, sure, but it’s always pre-eulogized. It’s always already lost.

This is not BL. This is not Luca. This is not softness. This is the queer cinema of grief, identity, and performativity. It’s Charli XCX’s Pop 2: slept on, ahead of its time, layered, emotionally deranged, and absolute perfection for those who get it.

Ozon says fuck assimilation. Fuck weddings, babies, and happy endings. He rewrites the queer narrative in his own gay-ass cursive: looping, fractured, melancholic, and bratty. Because the truth is: Alexis didn’t lose David. He lost the idea of David. And that hurts more.

Final thoughts?

Love is real. But one is the lover, and one is the beloved. The lover always stays. The beloved always dies. Even when they’re alive.

P.S. Summer of 85 walked so BRAT could run. That’s it. That’s the review.

#queer cinema

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