‘Infinite Summer’ Is Subtle and Stylish [Fantasia 2024 Review]
The cool kids of the future will be much like the cool kids of today, if Infinite Summer is any indication. This quirky Spanish/Estonian co-production about a shy teenager spending a lazy summer hanging out with her best friend’s mean-girl clique has the bones of a conventional morality tale—specifically, an anti-drug fable—fleshed out with subtle and stylish sci-fi touches. Its vision of hipsters in the near future (or perhaps an alternate dimension just a few degrees off from our own) makes Infinite Summer a bit of a companion piece to Tayarisha Poe’s underrated The Young Wife. But director Miguel Llanso’s (Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway) film has less soul than Poe’s, and is less substantial as a result.
The opening moments of Infinite Summer promise something delightfully weird, teasing a “new zoo” that will revolutionize animal captivity and introducing the audience to a Japanese-style mascot that looks like a big, orange pear-shaped chicken. Then the movie forgets about all of that for the next hour or so, shifting its focus to aimless Mia (Teele Kalijuvee-O’Brock) as she packs her suitcase and sets out for an Estonian beach house decorated in warm, organic ‘70s tones. There, she’ll spend the week with her bestie Grete (Johanna-Aurelia Rosin) and Grete’s party-girl Canadian friend Sarah (Hannah Gross), getting sun and flirting with boys.
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The one indication that this movie doesn’t quite take place in reality as we know it is revealed when Mia takes a hologram call from her dad. The same technology powers the girls’ favorite game, an app called Extreme Dating that allows them to swipe left on guys projected in front of them as if they’re in the same room. That’s how Mia meets the amusingly named Doctor Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies), a potbellied, long-haired weirdo who Sarah introduces to Mia as a joke but ends up being the key to a whole new level of summer fun.
The good doctor shows Mia a respirator-type device linked to a “mindfulness app” called Eleusis, which appears as a chirpy-voiced cloud of purple smoke that amplifies all the good feelings running through a person’s body. This could, hypothetically, lead someone to enlightenment, if they were full of compassion or clarity or whatever. But given that they’re teenagers with half-cooked brains, Grete and Sarah use the respirator to get fucked up, leaving Mia to bring them back from the lavender abyss.
That does and does not happen in the movie’s second half, which lays out a bizarre conspiracy that feels slight despite being global in scale. A clandestine pseudo-government agency gets involved. The big chicken comes back. More weird stuff happens. Its left-field details are a big part of its charm, but Infinite Summer isn’t grounded enough in its own internal logic. That keeps the elements from coming together in an intriguing way, and instead leaves an impression that’s pleasantly random, but not necessarily memorable.
Summary
‘Infinite Summer’ is pleasantly random, but not necessarily memorable
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