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Summer Rain - Preview

Summer Rain

Preview by Jack Foley

ANTONIO Banderas’s second film as director, Summer Rain, is described as a lushly romantic, beautifully crafted paean to young men coming of age in southern Spain in the 1970s.

The film was showcased at the Sundance Film Festival (2007) where it drew a decidedly mixed response.

Although an adaptation of a novel, the Sundance website credited with the picture as being infused with a very personal quality, unfolding as if from a memory.

“Pulsating with sexuality, resonant with poetry and song, Summer Rain is a lyric discovery that takes us into a fading, but vibrant, past,” wrote Geoffrey Gilmore.

The film follows the lives of three young men – Miguelito, Paco, and Babirusa – each of whom must confront his past, as well as his future, while indulging in the expected pursuits of youth on the threshold of adulthood, especially, of course, love and sex.

For nascent poet Miguelito, the focus of his passion falls on one girl in particular: Luli. As each young man discovers what life’s erratic fortunes have in store for him, they venture forth and leave this past and their youthful indiscretions behind.

Gilmore continued: “Summer Rain is a film that’s painterly in its vision, evocatively emotive, and erotic in a manner that only the Spanish do this well.

“It’s a film about dreams and ambition, about the bumps in the road of life, as well as a reverie for a time in life when everything seems possible.”

Commenting in the current edition of US film magazine Premiere, Banderas himself said: “When you do cheap movies, you have capacity to create. You don’t have a boot on top of your neck – you don’t have to sell this. I don’t have to.”

Summer Rain is a film that fulfils Banderas’s desire to maintain close links with his roots and Spanish filmmaking. It stars Alberto Amarilla, María Ruiz, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Abril, Félix Gómez, Juan Diego and Fran Perea.

Sadly, however, some journalists weren’t as impressed. The Hollywood Reporter referred to it as “a trainwreck of a movie”, while Variety wrote that it’s “a technically classy mood piece that ultimately falls victim to stylistic excesses”.