Infinite Summer

Did you ever have that feeling, during youthful summer holidays, that you never wanted them to end? This is the last summer that Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock) will get to spend having fun with her friends before they go off to start doing serious things with their lives. Mia is under pressure to do serious things too but, like many people that age, she doesn’t really know what she wants. Everything is in the now. She cycles along the promenade. She plunges into the sea. Sometimes she’s happy. Sometimes she sits on the jetty, dangling her toes in the water, feeling irritable but not sure why. Something is missing.

Something feels out of place from the very start of Miguel Llansó’s film, which screened as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival. it’s partly a result of the curious introductory scenes, which seem at first to have very little to do with the plot. Following a series of clips of animals and a sort of mini-documentary about the history of their captive exhibition, we pay a trip to Tallinn Zoo to meet Risto the crocodile. We will return there later, but on that occasion it will be what we don’t see that makes an impression.

How does one deal with unsettled feelings like this? For Mia, it’s a commonplace solution: sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. not that they’re all readily available. There are parties: young people hanging around, drinking and laughing and playing music and playing scrabble, speculating on Oumuamua and its curious visit to our solar system. There’s online dating, made more cinema-friendly by the use of holographic projections, where she doesn’t seem to be able to find any matches except the sexually uninspiring Dr Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies), who won’t go away. And there’s whatever Dr Mindfulness is pushing. He gives her a respirator as a ‘gift’. Is he a scam artist? He doesn’t seem to have much sexual interest in her either. She wants to seem cool, however, so she wears the respirator, breathes in the strange pink gas, dreams the dream it has for her.

“I am Eleusis,” says the voice. “Eleusis is a new kind of zoo where animals can reach their full potential.”

In cutaway moments we follow two secret agents trying to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Eleusis Biotechnologies. Meanwhile, Mia’s friends are getting into the respirator thing. She’s still hesitant, uneasy; to them, it borders on the sublime. They adopt Dr Mindfulness, hanging around in his scuzzy basement apartment, and she has nothing left that’s her own.

A wistful hippy daydream which goes on to become very dark indeed, Llansó’s fable unfolds gracefully thanks to his command of the different genres that make up its constituent parts. Most notably, there is the beguiling visual language of those seemingly endless summer days. It also benefits from a great supporting turn from Ivo Uukkivi as Mia's father, trying to strike the right balance between protectiveness and liberality, with a perspective on what’s happening to understand that it ultimately very different from her own. Whether the ending is a triumph or a tragedy is really a matter of interpretation, but from neither perspective does she really seem to have much agency. Then again, who does?