‘My Eternal Summer’ Review: A Danish Tearjerker Brought to Life in Poignant, Unsentimental Detail
Told through the eyes of 15-year-old Fanny (Kaya Toft Loholt), the intimate, deeply moving My Eternal Summer (Min Evige Sommer) observes an eventful vacation spent waiting for Fanny’s terminally ill mother, Karin (Maria Rossing), to die. In delicately balanced scenes filled with poignant detail, Denmark-based director Sylvia Le Fanu (making her feature debut) and her co-writer Mads Lind Knudsen unfurl a very Scandinavian portrait of a highly cultured bourgeois family facing a terrible trauma with stoicism, humor and quite a bit of drinking, often in tastefully decorated rooms.
After premiering in the New Directors strand at San Sebastian, the drama takes a short break to play in the BFI London Film Festival in another competitive strand. Its accessible depth of feeling could help it win distribution beyond the Nordic realms.
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Although Fanny appears in practically every scene in the film, the camera does occasionally break away to spend moments alone here and there with Fanny’s parents, Karin and Johan (Anders Mossling), as they cope with the logistics and inner turmoil of dealing with Karin’s impending death, presumably from cancer. But the viewpoint is so embedded with Fanny that, mimicking the way children live in blissful ignorance of how their parents provide for them, the sparse script never even tells us exactly what the couple do for a living — though scenes of Karin playing piano throughout and later talk of her students suggest she was either a musician or music teacher, while Johan’s dry wit and the way he totes around a book about the gulag hint that he might be an academic.
The point is that this this nuclear family of three is spending their last vacation together at their summer home, a charming seaside cottage located some distance from Copenhagen. No one is talking about work at this point. In fact, there’s not a lot of conversation going on at all as the trio settle into the dusty house, accept delivery of a hospital bed (since Karin can’t climb the stairs anymore) and make arrangements for the district nurse to pay home visits for her last days.
A dutiful only child, Fanny helps out as much as she can, but she’s still a teenager and thus prey to all the usual self-absorption. Her frustration with the cottage’s poor Wi-Fi signal is a sure sign of her restlessness as she copes with a profound sense of sadness about losing her mother, but also with boredom.
Her relationship with her boyfriend Jamie (Jasper Kruse Svabo), a sweet dim lunk of a guy, takes up a lot of her mental bandwidth. After his short visit in the early days of the trip, Fanny somewhat irrationally sees his subsequent lack of contact as ghosting, when really he’s probably just busy with sports and life back in the capital. She writes a wonderfully bad self-pitying poem about the last time they said goodbye and reads it to Karin, who naturally thinks at first that it’s a poem about her own imminent departure. When she works out that it’s actually about Jamie, she looks both faintly put out and mildly amused.
Such well observed details are sprinkled throughout, revealing the complexity, fallibility and kindness of ordinary people. At one point, Fanny tries to do one of those online personality tests and asks her folks which of a series of three-adjective sets best describe her: “serious, honest, faithful,” for example, or “loving, smart, thoughtful”? Johan, disdainful of the whole reductive sham, suggests she’s “bossy,” and he’s right. But Fanny is also all of the above, as well as angry, confused and, ultimately, deeply empathic once she stops mooning over Jamie.
As Karin’s condition slowly worsens, and friends come to say farewell at one last birthday party, the poor kid goes through all the stages of grief at once. At the end, she has just enough fortitude to do the right thing by her mother and father.
The subject matter alone could be enough to trigger geysers of tears in viewers, but what makes Le Fanu’s direction especially impressive is its lack of sentimentality. Instead, she focuses on daily rituals — the little murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the sense of exhaustion that stretches out for hours, days and weeks as one waits for someone to die.
Jan Bastian Munoz Marthinsen’s bright, clean lighting sits patiently by the characters’ sides and doesn’t draw any undue attention to itself. That goes as well for the score by Patricio Fraile and sound design by Frederik Lehmann Mikkelson, which work in tight tandem, mixing cello sighs with the sound of waves drifting to shore in equal measure. The performances from the whole cast, but above all Toft Loholt, Rossing and Mossling, are likewise no less pitch perfect.
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