Dernier été (1981)
Directed by Robert Guédiguian, Frank Le Wita

Film Review

In the early 1980s, Robert Guédiguian began his illustrious filmmaking career with Dernier été, a film that contains many of the defining elements of his subsequent work but which he himself was somewhat dismissive of.  For this debut piece, he shared directing duties with Frank Le Wita, whose only other directing credit was on Le Souffleur (1985), which he co-scripted with Guédiguian, although he subsequently produced Guédiguian's later film Le promeneur du Champ de Mars (2005), an account of the declining years of the French President François Mitterrand.

In common with a significant proportion of the director's subsequent output, Dernier été is set in his hometown of Marseille, and this sunny locale provides not only a vivid backdrop but also an essential protagonist in the drama.  As Jean Vigo did with a nearby Mediterranean resort in his short film À propos de Nice (1930), Guédiguian shows us two distinct facets of the city - the sun-drenched coastal paradise that tourists flock to in their millions each year sombrely contrasting with the other visage known to its hard-up locals who are seen struggling to survive in an era of post-industrial decline and burgeoning worker exploitation.

Guédiguian is often thought of as a social realist director but his cinema, whilst rich in authentic slices of life, seldom exhibits the pure social realism that we find. say, in that of Ken Loach.  Instead, he embellishes his naturalisitic perspective with other cinematic tropes, creating a distinctive, occasionally jarring but always profoundly humane form of auteur cinema that is unique to this remarkable filmmaker.  In Dernier été, Guédiguian attempts to blend social realism and film noir, and whilst the marriage is not an entirely convincing one it does give the film a harder edge, a more despairing sense of pessimism, than much of his work.

Classic film noir often applies to situations where the protagonist is on a doomed trajectory, struggling in vain against forces or individuals against whom he is hopelessly matched.  This is the sense that Guédiguian conveys in Dernier été with his characters, ordinary working class folk whose hopes for a happy life appear to be thwarted by the greedy self-interest of capitalists who either ignore them or exploit them in their relentless pursuit of wealth, regardless of the social cost.  The film's grim tone and its downbeat ending show Guédiguian at his most depressingly fatalistic, and this could at least partly explain why of all his films this is the one that is most overlooked.

Even in a film as gloomy as this there are still some rays of sunshine - the most luminous being the first on-screen encounter between Gérard Meylan and the director's wife, Ariane Ascaride, who would subsequently feature in most of Guédiguian's films.  Here we have a tantalising foretaste of the director's widely acclaimed 1997 film, Marius et Jeannette, with Meylan and Ascaride re-enacting a similarly fraught romance with even greater conviction and emotional power.  Dernier été is marred to a degree by Guédiguian's lack of experience as a writer and director, but despite its technical shortcomings it is still an engaging piece of cinema, in which its author manages to express his abiding social concerns with unquestionable sincerity and a strange chiaroscuro poetry that is as unsettling as it is beguiling.

Film Synopsis

In the Estaque district of Marseille, Gilbert and his friends face an uncertain future as the factories close down, bringing an inexorable rise in the level of unemployment among ordinary working people.  This gradual social decline is masked by the dramatic transformation that the French port is undergoing as the developers move in to create a holiday haven for well-off tourists.  With paid work hard to come by, men like Gilbert are forced to eke out a meagre existence by doing odd jobs and resorting to petty crime.  They still have time to indulge in more pleasurable pursuits, amusing themselves on the beach and chasing after women.  One day, Gilbert has a chance encounter with an attractive young woman named Josiane, who works at a nearby factory for a modest wage.  From the moment they meet, Gilbert knows that Josiane is the girl for him, but when life is so precarious and uncertain dare he hope that there can be a happy future for them both?