Short Stop: ÉTÉ 96 recalls simpler (?) times

 Recalling days that were simpler in some ways, but maybe more complex the more we think about them, Mathilde Bédouet's beautiful ÉTÉ 96 (Summer 96) hit me harder than I expected it to. What at first feels like a nostalgic bit of memory, piecing together disparate images and moments from a day at the beach, eventually builds to something a little rougher, heavier, more. There's more to the moment than meets the eye, more to the memory than childhood simplicity. Instead, the day (and more, the night), reveals itself to be an inflection point, one of those times in your life that innocence is lost, for better or for worse. In this case, I think, it's for the better. It feels like growth, more gained than lost.

ÉTÉ 96 finds two families spending a day at the beach together. So much of the screen is filled with white, which you might read as stark, or maybe serene. It certainly makes the piece feel like a memory, like all of the details can't quite be recalled and filled in, so we'll just remember what we can. Fleeting moments (kids rough-housing, one of the dads fiddling with a video camera) and various objects (a beach towel, a pair of water wings) exist in this nostalgic ether, there to be plucked or maybe just as easily forgotten if we don't give them their moment in the spotlight, don't hold them in our mind's eye. We live so much life, and almost all of it is forgotten. But some moments, like these, we hold onto.

Our protagonist is one of the kids on the trip, Paul, who seems the least at ease on this particular beach day. He's maybe ten or eleven, I'd guess, probably too old to don floaties before wading into the water, but he requests them nonetheless, much to his father's chagrin. It's one of the early moments of friction, but not the last.

The day goes awry when the kids use their spyglass to peer back at the town, and notice that the tide is coming in, covering the road back to civilization. A panic ensues, a hasty exit, a stuck car. It looks like the trip has become an overnight venture.

Here is where the short takes a turn to more abstract terrain, but just as evocative as what's come before. Paul has trouble sleeping, and goes on a bit of a journey that finds him confronting his childish ways, and deciding whether or not it's time to leave them behind. Maybe it's time to grow up. This sequence is rendered so beautifully, an inversion of the earlier scenes' color palette. Suddenly, Paul is swallowed in blackness, his usually dark hair shining white as he explores an unusual world. It's stunning.

As is the animation as a whole. The film looks it's drawn in crayon or pastels, maybe colored pencil. There's so much texture and feeling in the movement of the characters. You just feel the humanity of it all, that there are people making this, sharing these moments, sharing this story. It isn't some shiny, filtered, perfected thing. It's raw and beautiful and immediate, and it's all the more effective because of it. I especially love how much these colorful images pop in seas of negative space, like unfinished coloring book pages, trying to share as much as possible but knowing that there are things that can never be remembered, and thus can never be shared.

When the dedication popped up at the end, "à mes parents," I couldn't hold back the tears. Bédouet was inspired to make the film after discovering tapes in her father's closet of a similar day at a similar beach in a similar year. And knowing that, and seeing that dedication, made ÉTÉ 96's personal nature really show. I already felt it, but there it was. I'm glad to share in this reflection or refraction of that memory, in all its empathy and messiness.