Welcome to Anatomy of a Queer Sex Scene, a series by Drew Burnett Gregory and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about queer sex scenes in film. This week, Kayla writes about the 2015 French film Summertime (also known by its French title La Belle Saison), directed by Catherine Corsini. A note from Kayla: After I’d written this piece, while doing research about what Corsini has been up to, I came across information about her most recent film, which was removed from Cannes following harassment allegations against Corsini and sexual misconduct from members of the crew. This feels essential to acknowledge up top.

I had not seen the 2015 French film Summertime until preparing to write this entry for Anatomy of a Queer Sex Scene, and when I sat down to write after, I had the urge to just write a full review of the film, nearly a decade after it came out. That’s not what this column is supposed to be though. It’s about sex. Sex on screen. But my temptation to write about every aspect of the film makes perfect sense, because among the many things Summertime does well (its gorgeous cinematography and lush landscapes; its refusal to water down France’s women’s movement of the 1970s, depicted as explicitly anti-cop; its captivating performances; its commentary on class), is its assertion that sex can touch every part of life, how it often does, especially when you’re someone whose sexual desires are repressed.

So, I will try to write about just the sex. But the sex in Summertime is never just sex.

Delphine is a farm girl in rural France being pressured by her father to marry. But when she isn’t working hard on the farm, she’s busy secretly hooking up with another local girl who eventually dismisses their relationship as something unserious. Delphine does what a lot of dykes would do after this rejection and blows up her life, leaving the farm for Paris where she hopes to start anew. But Summertime isn’t your typical Character Is Running Away From Home Because She Hates It There narrative. Delphine loves farm life and the physical labor it requires. She loves home; it just doesn’t love her back.

See, I’m already having trouble sticking to the sex.

In Paris, Delphine meets Carole, who ushers Delphine into her feminist group. It’s 1971, and Carole and her friends are fighting for women’s liberation from equal pay to reproductive justice. The two become entangled, and suddenly they’re fucking. All. The. Time.

The first sex scene in Summertime comes after Carole tells Delphine she isn’t a lesbian, and Delphine says she isn’t either before pulling Carole into an alleyway where they both instantly start making out. A lot of films would end the moment there, but no, Carole and Delphine — mere minutes after both denying their queerness — end up in bed together. It’s Carole’s first time with a woman, but it isn’t Delphine’s.

Soon thereafter, and despite Carole’s boyfriend, they’re fucking all the time. They have so much sex they need to refuel with cookies, eaten in bed while they both lounge naked. These post-coital sex scenes are every bit as erotic as the actual fucking, perhaps even more so, realistic in the way both bodies are sort of jumbled, limbs akimbo. They’re not perfectly staged but rather mashed together sloppily, in positions that perhaps even look uncomfortable. Their desire for each other overwrites that though, intimacy creating comfort and ease, like they’re finally doing exactly what their bodies want to do. They laugh during sex, too, something I haven’t seen a lot of in lesbian sex scenes, which tend to more often be intense, but Summertime allows for playfulness, for self-discovery that is meaningful, sure, but also not so self-serious.

At one point, Carole smokes a cigarette naked on Delphine’s balcony, liberated and fully in her body. “Down with bourgeoisie society!” she shouts, arching her back against the railing, tits pointing toward Delphine off-screen, likely admiring this display of simultaneous seduction and manifesto from bed, where Carole joins her again. There really is so much fucking in this movie.

Things shift when Delphine’s father has a stroke and she’s summoned back to the farm. Carole eventually joins, but here she has to be Delphine’s friend not lover. They still sneak away to have sex in fields or into each other’s separate rooms in the farmhouse when they’re sure Delphine’s mother is asleep. Their sex life moves from cramped Parisian flats to the great outdoors, but while there’s a sense of freedom and expansiveness to their surroundings and the way these scenes are shot, it’s contrasted by their reality, which is that they are not free here, cannot be. Their relationship must be pushed to the places where they cannot be seen. But while the land may be vast in Delphine’s town, it’s also a claustrophobic place where hiding is difficult. They keep being seen or almost seen by watchful eyes. It puts Delphine on edge and drives a wedge between her and Carole, who doesn’t fully understand the new context she finds herself in.

Summertime resists the narrative of a farm girl moving to the city and suddenly learning from enlightened city women who light a path leading away from her past and her roots. By the contrary, Delphine’s lived experiences teach Carole so much more than the women’s group can. It’s fascinating to see Carole’s politics falter once she’s in Delphine’s context. She sees Delphine’s family and home as backwards and wrong when really it’s a place that stands the most to gain from liberation but also where things move differently. Delphine believes in all the same things as Carole, but she also loves her home, loves the farm, even when that comes at the expense of her sexual agency and safety.

Through sex, Delphine ushers Carole into her own queerness. Again, Summertime subverts the expected narrative. The closeted farm girl has way more to teach about queerness and lesbian sex than the slick, vocally feminist city girl.

And perhaps Delphine and Carole have tricked themselves into believing the sex they have creates a bubble around them, strips them of their respective contexts, but the film makes it clear this isn’t so, and they gradually realize it, too, building to the film’s sad but still lovely ending. During sex, Delphine and Carole are always reaching toward one another, arms perpetually entwined around each other’s bodies. But those bodies are never oriented the same way. Their feet always face different directions. Carole and Delphine are indeed running toward different but still intertwined things, their freedom bound but disparate. Delphine wants to find her own freedom without abandoning farm life, and she eventually does. Carole wants to continue her work of getting abortion and contraceptive access to young women in the city, which she eventually does, too. Again, it’s all connected, just different sides of the same fight playing out on deeply personal levels. It’s possible to hold onto someone tight but still diverge.

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