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| Infinite Summer Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Three teenage girls enjoying their last lazy summer together before college. A mysterious purveyor of respirators and an unknown drug. Glimpses of the far future, of transformative potential – but for better, or worse? Miguel Llansó’s Infinite Summer blends a lot of complex ideas, with wistful nostalgia and something that, depending on your perspective, could be interpreted as cosmic horror. He was a little nervous about presenting it to the Fantasia international Film Festival because his previous work was quite a bit lighter, but I assured him he had nothing to worry about, as he reflected on its origins.
“It's difficult to understand when a film starts because you start reading stuff and collecting ideas and suddenly you have some sort of a story, and you have a first screenplay,” he says. “I was reading a lot about origins of humanity. I was reading a book about the discovery of Lucy – she was the first hominid that was discovered, in Hadar in Ethiopia. I lived for many years in Ethiopia. Lucy is three million years old, and I was looking towards the future, like another three million years. I like to think about that cosmic trip in a moment which is very crucial right now, where technologies can really change our bodies.
“It was in the pandemic time, with the vaccinations and the genetic modifications. I was reading a lot about that. At the same time, my producers wanted to do something more like a slasher. So I said, how do I combine all this cosmic time and perception of the very big future in something like a slasher coming of age film? And this clash between these two ideas, I think, was the genesis of the film.”
I tell him that I love the way he captures the visual language of films about nostalgia and teenage summers. Was that an important priority?
“Totally. Because, yes, Estonian summers are very special. They have a great light. And Estonia is cold eight months a year, very cold. I'm from Madrid, so the nostalgia comes from the fact that I really miss the Mediterranean area. When it comes, the summer, the afternoons are really slow and the light is beautiful. Even at 11:00pm in the night, there is still light. And this is the right environment to travel back in time. You know when you were a kid, in the summers, it looked like everything was possible, right?
“The first time you go to a discotheque, dating someone for the first time. I remember that times, and it was very scary and at the same time, very interesting and exciting. These two things are at the core of the film. How to grow and how scared we are and at the same time, how exciting it is. But I think then I realised that although we believe that it's in our teenage years that we are all, the whole time, scared and excited, it's feeling that repeats and repeats throughout our life.”
We see Mia's perspective on that, growing up, but also her father's perspective as he sees her slipping away and getting into something dangerous.
“Maybe that’s because I'm a father myself,” he says. “When I shot the movie, I just had my first baby – she was like, a month old. But I've always been a person kind of escaping, going away, but with a very strong sense of belonging at the same time – like in the Odyssey or every Greek tale, you know, you go to the hell and you come back home. In all my films, there is a strong sense of adventure and a strong sense of home, both things. So I think the father represents that a bit and the adults represent that.
“It's more a little bit conservative, but at the same time, they understand they should let the bird fly by herself somehow. And it's a very difficult moment because it's scary, but you cannot control everything. You cannot control the fate of your child. You cannot control the fate of your nation. And we live in a moment that is very critical, the moment of globalisation. I think people are coming back to their very strong identities because things are changing so much that we get very scared. So in a very simple level, father, daughter; if we go to a bigger level, we consider immigration or emigration. We consider changes in the world. There are a lot of people that are very scared about that.”
We talk about the respirators that Mia and her friends are given by Dr Mindfulness, a man she meets through an online dating app.
“It was very important for me that it was biochemical. I was reading about genetic modifications and CRISPR, which is a technique for changing your gene sequence. It was important that it was not only a mental experience, but it was a bodily experience, so I needed a substance that gets in the body and changes its biochemistry. So I was thinking maybe an injection. I didn't like it very much, I think. And it's also not so attractive. Probably people wouldn't inject things.
“I was discussing this with the people that sometimes do the props for my films. They made the flies in Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway. They create all the costumes. And for this one they made something like a mask, something that contains certain fluid that can get into your body and can start changing its biochemistry. And breathing is something very interesting, because it's a metaphor that has been used very much from the beginning of art. The breath, in and out.”
There are just a handful of technological elements to suggest that the main part of the story is set in the near future. One of these is the use of holograms in the dating app – but using apps will itself be unfamiliar to many older viewers.
“When I was young, there was not even internet,” he says with a sheepish smile. “And now I think what changed is that the young people – I talk a lot with my students, and I find that it's enough for them. For me, when technology starts with all these dating apps like Tinder, they’re a tool for the real dating. You start with a dating app and you finally meet in a café or whatever. But now I think it's enough for them. It's another way of relating. You don't need the real thing. So it has acquired the status of reality, even if it's virtuality, which is very interesting for me. It's not a tool anymore, it's a new reality.”
That's something that the wider themes of the film reflect, that there's a dramatic transition happening now within society, whereby we think differently about what’s real.
“Yeah. I wonder if reality stays the bodily experience. I wanted to reflect a little bit about that. But what about a smell? What about touching? What about, you know, sharing an afternoon in Estonia during the summer? That kind of experience is vanishing somehow.”
We move on to talk about locations.
“It was all around Tallinn, or close to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia,” he explains. It was very beautiful. It was the summer, and I involved a lot of my students. We had the heads of the teams that were more professional, some of my friends, but we involved a lot of students and young people. I was very open to listening to their suggestions about the art and the actors themselves. The second assistant director was my students, so it was very nice because I wanted to be surrounded by young people and their ideas, and we formed a great team. I only work with friends. I cannot work with professional teams. We can be professional. And we really had a great experience, and we are friends.”
I note that I like the messiness of the locations where the young characters hang out. Was that created deliberately, or did it just develop organically?
“Mostly, because we worked with natural locations, obviously it makes no sense to make a storyboard before you have the locations, so it develops organically within the scenes and rehearsals. And with the great eye also of Israel [Seoane], my cinematographer. We’ve known each other for more than 20 years. He was living with me in Ethiopia, we have been collaborating forever, and it's very easy for us to go and start imagining the locations also with the art. Like, how do we do this? Where do we put the people? And then when the actors come, it becomes organic. I'm very happy with the vibe of the locations.”
He’s also happy about being at Fantasia.
“It's my favourite fest. I'm a bit scared because my previous film has been very cartoonish and this one was a bit more realistic, and I don't know how the audience will react. Maybe the excess of psychology will play against me, but we have to do something new. I think that the Fantasia audience is very open to weird stuff and seeing the world with the eyes of imagination.”
He doesn’t always see that in the wider world, he laments.
“I think there is some lack of faith in the world. You know, everything is politics. What about poetry and imagination? I think the audience here, in Fantasia, they like the imaginary. So I'm not so scared,” he concludes, adopting a more confident tone. “I'm not so scared.”
