Summer Vacation: 1999

I happened upon Summer Vacation and was fully amazed by the lyricism of loneliness in the film. The story provides an almost mystical view of four boys away at a Japanese school. They are all haunted to a degree by the suicide death of one of their friends. These repressed emotions are brought to a head by the arrival of a new student who looks amazingly like the dead friend.

All the boys, in one manner or another loved the dead youth, and while the story of why he committed suicide is never fully resolved, the emotional resonance of the film is astounding. Director Shusuke Kaneko embodied the film with a stunning beauty and poetic lyricism that I hadn't seen before. Only recently with films by Ang Lee have I seen films that have surpassed its reach.

The films deals with the awakening of emotions-love, lust, jealousy, and even fear. The boys, innocent in their beauty, but somehow lost in the torrent of their emotions, offer a concomitant homoeroticism and sexual repression, portrayed in the context of newly awakening sexual emotions. The beauty and confusion is only amplified as the viewer realizes that the young boys are all played by Japanese girls.

The films pace is slow, almost languid. Like watching heat rise of a lake on a hot summer's day. You revel in the beauty of the journey, not the speed in which you arrive at the final destination. Kaneko manages to portray a world, out of time. A futuristic view (the film was made in the late '80's) that seems almost periodic. It harkens memories, allusions, and allegories- touching upon the viewers emotions to complete missing components of the film.

I readily admit this film may not be for everyone. I was more than emotional available for it to play on my feelings of isolation, loneliness, and need. But that said, I can still to this day, place the video in and be swept away into a land where love is new, emotions are burgeoning, and pain has a beauty that can encompass and transpose. The film provided a strength to me, something that propelled me back outside, to the lakes of Madison. But this time not to watch, but to meet, to touch, to participate in the joy and beauty that surrounded me.

After 9 years, I still place this in my top ten films of all time.


Boarding school lonliness and despair   March 26, 2000
S. Lyons (Pleasantville, USA)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

A well-acted Japanese film, Summer 1999 approaches a strange subject using strange actors: A foursome of schoolboys, from ages 11 or so to 16 or so are left alone for the mid-year holiday, lamenting over their repressed love for each other and the suicide death of one of the younger players. This film is remarkable in that, at least in the case of the older, androgynous teens, boys are being played by girls. The plot is rather clear, but muddled in its message: the new, younger schoolboy comes to the school, and bears an identical resem- blance to the boy who committed suicide. The rest of the cast are haunted by their feelings for each other, for the new boy, and for their dead friend. Intended as a futuristic piece, without any reference to such, it is actually a "period" piece, exploring the emotional/sexual/social repression of boarding school, Japanese style. Artistically, this film is well-done, yet long. It views as a filmed play, which could have been done in an hour onstage with two or three set changes. The karmic message of the final scene leaves more questions in the viewers' minds; did the schoolboys hallucinate the return of their dead friend, or will he keep coming back again and again?