From feelgood romances to heated interactions, here are the films that best capture the seasonal moment
Let’s begin at the end. 2 September 1962: the final night of the summer vacation; one last big blowout before adult life intervenes. George Lucas’s rambunctious salute to footloose youth paints vivid vignettes of Modesto, California, rocking around the clock with its loose-knit gaggle of characters. But this has one eye on the metre and knows that time is running short.
“It’s a working holiday,” insists Olivia Colman’s brittle academic, blasting her factor-50 smile at the bemused guests and staff of a Greek island resort. She’s in flight from her past and liable to combust any second. Paradise here offers little rest or respite. The professor has made a clean getaway, but she’s brought along all her baggage.
In which Natalie Press’s working-class Yorkshire lass finds an exotic foreign land just a hop and a skip across the moor in the form of the ivy-clad house of Emily Blunt’s boarding-school princess. Director Paweł Pawlikowski slowly turns up the temperature as the girls lean into the season, lounging in the dry grass and listening to Edith Piaf. They’re at once stickily close and a thousand miles apart.
David Lean’s tender Technicolor romance was one of the first British films to be shot entirely on location, strolling around beautiful, dirty Venice in the company of Katharine Hepburn’s middle-aged Miss Lonelyheart. Lean called for her to step backwards into the green canal at Campo San Barnaba. Hepburn gamely obliged and clambered out with conjunctivitis.
Sex and death ride shotgun in Alfonso Cuarón’s lustful field trip through turn-of-the-century Mexico. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are teenage buddies who light out for the beach with their engines overheating; Maribel Verdú co-stars as the exacting older woman who, if not quite steering them straight, at least helps point them in interesting new directions.
A summer holiday list without Summer Holiday? It would be like the Tower without the ravens or mistletoe without the wine. Directed with an easy swing by Peter Yates (his debut, and he would go on to make Bullitt and Breaking Away), this now stands as a colourful blast from the past, an innocent postcard from postwar, pre-Brexit Europe. A blue-collar bus mechanic – embodied by Cliff Richard – magics up a new route from Hertfordshire down to Athens, complete with entertainment and a flurry of comic misadventures. Only a churl wouldn’t get on board.
Céline Sciamma makes small rousing films about secret lives, sanctuaries and precious stolen moments. Tomboy is one of her best: a gorgeous coming-of-age tale about 10-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran), who – bouncing between schools, the new kid on the block – introduces herself as Mickaël and effectively becomes another person. Sciamma’s implied message? That the humble summer break can be a transformational timeout, with September’s child only distantly related to July’s.
The pool is a mirror in Jacques Deray’s dazzling, depthless thriller pungently set on the French Riviera and tapping the off-screen tensions of co-stars Romy Schneider and Alain Delon. If La Piscine’s air of modish ennui now feels overused, that’s because it’s a design classic, most notably lifted and adapted by both François Ozon’s Swimming Pool and Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash.
“Rome. By all means, Rome,” declares Audrey Hepburn’s runaway princess after spending a liberative, life-changing few days in the eternal city with Gregory Peck’s US newsman. As for the movie, this might be the ultimate European and American meet-cute. Shot on location, skipping between the tourist sights, Roman Holiday wedded old-school Hollywood romance with the looser rhythm of Italian neorealism.
Eric Rohmer was the poet laureate of French dreamers, the creator of films that feel flyweight and then linger for a lifetime. A Summer’s Tale is his semi-autobiographical account of a lost summer spent on the coast of Brittany pursuing sea shanties and women with the same awkward stumble. It’s a hazy, lazy joy of a film, brimming with sunlight and rocked by the backwash of chatter and song.
Everything’s big in this Borscht Belt summer classic. Big gestures, big emotions, big drums on the soundtrack, big hair. It’s 1963 and Baby (Jennifer Grey) is getting whisked off her feet by Patrick Swayze’s bad-boy dance instructor. The Catskills are a cauldron of class and ethnic tensions; first love is an intoxicating, disorientating hot mess. Resistance is futile: the film lifts and spins us. Grand finale, big reward.
The best holidays are the ones that you never, ever want to end. Michel Franco’s Sundown casts Tim Roth as mild-mannered Neil, whose Mexican vacation is interrupted by the news of his mother’s sudden death. The trouble is that Neil would really prefer not to leave. So he pretends he’s lost his passport, shoves his tear-stained family through the departure gate and then circles back to the beach with the satisfied air of a man who’s just put out all the bins. Who is this Neil? What the hell is he thinking? He’s the shadow beneath the parasol, the chip of ice in the cocktail glass and the finest existential antihero this side of L’Étranger.
LP Hartley’s source novel was elegant and reflective, weighed down by the heat as it traces the illicit exchange of letters via a lovestruck schoolboy. Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter make the mood more jangly and atonal, perpetually on the verge of panic. What a wonderfully treacherous period drama this is, the filmic equivalent of a strip of flypaper. All the characters are stuck and squirming. None of them are getting away unscathed.
This was initially lower on the list, as befits its musty antique status, but then I watched it again and it’s flawless – there’s nothing else quite like it. Jacques Tati is the hapless holidaymaker who haunts the wings of a seaside town sometimes as a mute witness, sometimes as an agent of gentle chaos. If anything, Tati’s comedy grows more cherishable with each passing decade. Watching it is like peering into a forgotten tide-pool ecosystem: the rumble-tumble lost world of the postwar French resort.
