‘That Summer In Paris’ review: Tender debut plays out as the city hosts the 2024 Olympics

Dir: Valentine Cadic. France. 2025. 77mins

Valentine Cadic’s debut characteristic That Summer season In Paris displays the fragile contact and lightweight, ethereal method that immediately evokes the cinema of Eric Rohmer. A girl’s vacation go to to the Paris Olympics unfolds with surprising challenges and valuable moments that mix to solid a bewitching spell. The temporary operating time suggests one thing slight, however Cadic invests her story with wealthy emotion and dry, impish humour. New Story have the French rights to a movie that ought to delight Francophile audiences internationally, though a extra impressed English language title would possibly assist its probabilities elsewhere.

Cadic invests her story with wealthy emotion and dry, impish humour

That Summer season In Paris reunites Cadic with Blandine Madec, who starred in her brief movie The Summer season Holidays (2023) the place, like right here, she additionally performed a personality referred to as Blandine. This Blandine is a piano instructor from Normandy who arrives in Paris on the top of the 2024 Olympic Video games. She intends to satisfy together with her half sister Julie (India Hair) and her niece Alma (Lou Deleuze), however her solely different concrete plan is to observe her favorite swimmer Beryl Gastaldello in motion within the Olympic pool.

Blandine appears the very definition of somebody who’s alone in a crowd. She is a putting determine on the streets of Paris together with her pink and sky blue rucksack, navy blue shorts and pink t-shirt. Nothing appears to go her means because the cumbersome rucksack precludes her entry to the Olympics. Her spartan lodging is a high bunk within the Saint Christopher’s Canal Hostel, the place she is surrounded by the noise of brushing enamel, latecomers, nervous giggles and whispered conversations.

Madec’s Blandine is awkward and hesitant as she finds herself alone within the huge metropolis. Cinematographer Naomi Amarger makes probably the most of a bustling, sun-dappled Paris, capturing places from the vacationer sights of  the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame to graffiti-filled aspect streets and the world round Rosa Parks Station. Crowds fill the streets, big out of doors screens broadcast the triumphs of swimmer Leon Marchand and there’s a carnival environment that already feels nostalgic. Cadic additionally captures opposing points of the Olympics as homeless individuals are cleared from the streets and protestors problem the price of the occasions.

Blandine ultimately meets with Julie for the primary time in a decade, which speaks volumes in itself. We begin to study a bit of extra of her previous, and the latest finish of her five-year love affair with the unseen Caroline. Blandine appears to seek out it simpler to talk together with her eight year-old niece than any of the adults who enter her life. Conversations go on round her, however by no means appear to contain her. 

That Summer season In Paris is all about human connection. Blandine enjoys magical moments with Julie and Alma as they spend a stifling sizzling night time sleeping collectively on the balcony of Julie’s residence, or head to the park for a birthday picnic with buddies, Julie’s ex Paul (Matthias Jacquin) and golden retriever Coquillette. Blandine appears to share the traits of the canine – loyal, pleasant and guileless. She additionally makes a candy reference to electrician Benjamin (Arcadi Radeff).

Cadic and her writing accomplice Marietta Desert create moments of bone dry humour as Blandine finds herself arrested by the police and units off alongside the streets of Paris with the misplaced confidence of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. There could also be wistful, melancholy undertones to her character, however she will not be a determine to pity. Her means to be completely different from the gang and true to herself makes the character and the movie all of the extra tenderly interesting.