Critics reviews

A gorgeous coming-of-age tale paralleling a would-be teen pilot's wish to conquer her vertigo and take to the skies with her falling into a joyous summer fling with another girl. It marks Alantė Kavaitė as a director to watch.

Dreamy and delicate, trite and oh so earnest, "The Summer of Sangaile" presents a soft-core frolic in teenage Sapphic bliss with the solemnity of a world-shattering event. Crowding the screen with more coming-of-age metaphors than either dialogue or story, the Lithuanian writer and director Alante Kavaite composes a hymn to infatuation and a sonnet to afterglow.

The aviation theme recurs in frequent bird's-eye views that sweep over the small yet affecting story. "Thanks for being you," Sangaile says to Auste at one point. It's a simple statement, maybe a little sentimental, but in this tale of young love, it works.

Its aesthetics are so intimately aligned with its concepts that it avoids redundancy completely. The dramatization of a dream has none of the visual clichés of a dream sequence, as when a naked female body floats in a lake, in ecstasy, or when Sangaile stares at animals and critters and the audiences is never sure if the dead ants, worms, and lobsters are the actual objects of her gaze or their symbolic rendition. The film, then, turns poetic digressions into a self-sufficient cinematic method.

The plot may well be well-trodden but Kavaïté succeeds in representing the throes of young sexual desire as essential fuel for artistic inspiration—Auste is a fashion designer and photographer who pushes Sangailė to face her fears both physical and emotional.

Bathed in an almost choreographic sensuality, the movie offers a keen observation of these two 17-year-old teens carried along by the dynamic of life, all while offering the luxury of captivating aerobatics scenes. Spiral dives and barrel rolls in the sky reflect the controlled skill that makes us think of a director whose very human auteur cinema is not without its visual ambition.

Kavaite is a master of shifting, quicksilver moods, and whatever "Summer of Sangaile" may lack in originality and dramatic urgency, it makes up for in a lightly intoxicating atmosphere. Summer, indeed, is as much the star of the movie as Auste and Sangaile themselves, the long, lazy days stretching out slowly in a way that recalls Eric Rohmer's summertime films, as the characters look on from rooftops, frolic in the woods, or otherwise surrender themselves to the pull of nature and the season.

What should thus build towards a traditional coming-of-age high upon the conquering of fears merely leaves one cold, as any semblance of internal passion isn't conveyed by either the actress's performance or Kavaïté's script, which prefers to channel its energy into sex scenes involving tutus and christmas lights.

The film gets increasingly silly as it becomes more and more overtly therapeutic. Despite hailing from a country not often represented at film festivals—this might be the first Lithuanian film I've ever seen, and I've seen a whole lotta films—The Summer Of Sangaile is very much a typical "Sundance movie," to the extent that such a rote beast exists.