In the new film Hot Milk, the sensual but diffident 20-something Sofia (Emma Mackey) travels with her invalid mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), to the Mediterranean shores of Spain in search of an experimental cure for the latter’s (possibly hypochondriac) illness. But the sun-scorched resort town also supplies an opportunity for Sofia to swim and sunbathe alongside a fellow German tourist, Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), whose permissive lifestyle clashes sharply with Rose’s. Soon, the pouty Sofia—a near doppelgänger for Jane Birkin circa 1969—embraces the erotic languor she experiences in her mother’s absence. Yet what sounds like the start of a frothy tale of sexual awakening turns blackly suspenseful as Sofia’s simmering resentments and desire for liberation pit her against Rose in a battle for familial control.
Based on the 2016 novel by Deborah Levy—whose previous work Swimming Home, from 2011, also makes use of the villa holiday to probe themes of sexual longing and family ties—Hot Milk’s blend of summery climate and dark eroticism fits into a distinctive cinematic legacy. Instead of the twilit settings and bleak, urban climes that define classical film noir, the summer noir—or, perhaps, vacation thriller—highlights characters suffering from the corrupting dangers of too much sunlight, a Victorian phobia for the combination of environmental heat and recreative estrangement that can breed a kind of morbid, hothouse atmosphere of moral lassitude.
European cinema helped to produce much of summer noir’s lexicon of themes, settings, and archetypes: Its fascination with the storied decadence of the leisure class—and the profligate rituals of the seasonal tourist—appeared in earlier film satires by Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati. But summer noir’s focus on the images of sun-soaked flesh and seething nihilism dovetailed most closely with the post-’60s era, which had pushed moral and aesthetic regimes to new extremes.
On the occasion of Hot Milk’s release, Vogue has put together a list of some of summer noir’s best entries. Whether it is Alain Delon wasting away in the canyons of the Cote d’Azur or Mimsy Farmer shooting heroin on the beaches of Ibiza, these films reveal that too much daylight has its own kind of darkness—and that the pleasures of seasonal debauchery can often lead to the tragedy of a permanent vacation.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Although not a summer noir in the strict sense, this silent film classic by German director F. W. Murnau is the urtext for all subsequent cautionary tales about summer temptation. As the opening intertitle reads: “For wherever the sun rises and sets in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”
The film begins with a nameless woman from the city who visits the countryside for a summer holiday. After some weeks of lazing about, she meets and seduces a married farmer whose boredom has left him dreaming of a better life. While the two lounge at the edge of a lake, the woman, now his mistress, suggests to the man that he should drown his wife so that he can sell his farm and move away to the city. As with many future summer-noir films, the body of water serves as a place of moral suspension, decadent daydreaming, and physical danger. The man agrees and takes his unsuspecting wife on a surprise boat ride. His plot, however, fails in mid journey, and the two end up traveling on a tram from the country to the city, where the man pleads for his wife’s forgiveness. Together, they imbibe city life for a day and rekindle their love. Then, on the trip back to the country, a sudden storm overtakes their boat, and the wife appears to drown. The man returns to the farm and, in a rage, attempts to kill the mistress who has been waiting for him. But the wife reappears, having miraculously survived, and they kiss just as the sun rises over the countryside.
After nearly a century, Sunrise is a unique artifact of the silent era—more a visual poem than a film, just as it is suggested in the title. While the black-and-white palette and chiaroscurist shadowing bear all of the nocturnal hallmarks of Expressionist and traditional film noir, Murnau’s detailed attention to changing landscapes (from city to country and farm to shore to lake) and environment (the cycle of day and night, images of thick fog, the sudden thunderstorm, the multiple sequences climaxing in sunlight) has an atmospheric sensitivity that anticipates summer noir’s own emphasis on climate and light. And while its fairy-tale-like tone and happy ending ultimately transform what begins as a summertime murder plot into a humanist allegory, it should not distract from Murnau’s darker indictment of the dangers of idle daydreaming and exotic seductions, particularly those which mistake a tourist’s fantasy for a home.
Purple Noon (1960)
The first classic of the summer-noir genre is no doubt René Clément’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a young American upstart who travels to Italy and murders a wealthy socialite before stealing his identity and seducing his wife. The film is set in the fictional Mongibello, which Highsmith based on the resort towns along the Amalfi Coast, and unlike nearly all of the previous decade’s noir films, Purple Noon presents its seaside setting in colorful daytime to dazzling visual effect. As its French title, Plein Soleil (“direct sunlight”), suggests, evil can appear just as easily in the full glare of daylight as it does in darkness. The film also distinguishes itself from earlier noir paradigms by choosing a main character whose teen-idol-like appearance differed from the steely and strong-jawed features of those characters that previously dominated the genre. And indeed, it is newcomer Alain Delon’s turn as the handsome but homicidal Ripley that makes the film a seductive and menacing summertime masterpiece.
More (1969)
By the end of the 1960s, what remained of the Western counterculture had turned increasingly to violence, decadence, and narcosis as the political and cultural utopia promised in the previous decade had begun to collapse. Art-house and exploitation films reflected this mood of burnout by sending their bohemian characters to exotic or hidden locales on permanent vacation. In Barbet Schroeder’s debut film, More, German student Stefan (Klaus Grünberg) and his new lover, Estelle (Mimsy Farmer), travel to Ibiza to live outside of society and frolic naked on the craggy bluffs for a summer. They sunbathe, take drugs, and make love with complete abandon. However, their fledgling romance is eventually interrupted by Doctor Wolf, a heroin supplier and former Nazi who is also hiding out in Ibiza. Wolf takes Estelle as his sex slave after her heroin habit compels her to steal a large quantity from him. Now alone and hooked on heroin himself, Stefan intentionally overdoses and is buried on the island.
In More, bohemian life is at once beautiful and rotten. One of the most nihilistic entries in the genre, the film shows how the sybaritic pleasures of youth can be reduced to desperation and despair even in the midst of an exotic, sun-bleached paradise.
La Piscine (1969)
As something of a companion piece to More, Jacques Deray’s summer thriller La Piscine is a far more dramatic and insidious tale of tropical desire, lassitude, and violence. The film’s languid pacing and saturated images of summertime on the Côte d’Azur are intensified by the impossibly beautiful ensemble cast of Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, and Jane Birkin, in one of her earliest feature roles. Much like his previous turn in Purple Noon, Delon embodies the preening narcissist Jean-Paul, whose barely concealed vulnerability and jealousy lead him to murder a rival. In La Piscine, it is old friend Harry (Maurice Ronet), whose professional dynamism and flirtations with Jean-Paul’s girlfriend, Marianne (Schneider), cause layabout Jean-Paul to drown him in the swimming pool that is the tranquil setting for much of the film. More disturbing, however, is that neither Marianne nor Birkin’s Penelope (the murdered man’s own daughter) seems to care. The inertia of wealth is as enervating as a hot summer day at the pool. La Piscine’s dark summer romp through the dangers of lust, jealousy, and gluttony proves nothing is ultimately sexier than the privilege of indifference.
Last Summer (1969)
The exploitation film Last Summer is an understated souvenir of late-’60s Americana that is still mostly Francophile in tone. Directed by Frank Perry—whose films David and Lisa and the Cheever-penned The Swimmer were similarly modest counterculture classics—Last Summer is perhaps best remembered for the controversial X rating earned by its final rape scene. Taking a cue from its European art-house counterparts, the film follows a trio of wealthy teenagers (including Barbara Hershey, in one of her first roles) whose summer on Fire Island climaxes in an act of sexual violence after they meet a younger, more naive fourth. Like the rakish characters in La Piscine, those in Last Summer are caught in a folie à plusieurs, where the idyllic island setting seems to arouse their worst impulses. More than 50 years after its release, this tale of summer seems to sum up the dark arc of the counterculture, its images ranging from the innocent bohemianism of the Beach Boys to the mindless violence of the Manson family.
Hotel Fear (1978)
The most obscure entry on this list, Hotel Fear (Pensione Paura in Italian) is the sort of art-house exploitation film in which the Italians excelled in the late 1970s. A cinematic potpourri of giallo film, coming-of-age drama, rape-revenge fantasy, and historical chamber piece, Hotel Fear centers on a lakeside resort’s struggling proprietors, who must endure the depravities of their guests to save their home and survive the austere conditions of wartime. The film is set during the waning days of Mussolini’s rule of Italy, but the hotel’s sheltered, lacustrine setting only makes indirect nods to the collapsing world beyond it via the sounds of approaching bombers and electric blackouts. Meanwhile, widow Marta and her teenage daughter, Rosa, slave away in the kitchen, clean the threadbare bedrooms, and assuage the guests who seem to have holed up there permanently to ride out the war. These increasingly crazed visitors spend their days lazing on the shore, drinking and eating, carousing with prostitutes, and abusing Rosa (played by B-movie actress Leonora Fani, who would also star in the equally notorious vacation film Giallo in Venice) for their own entertainment. After Marta dies under mysterious circumstances, the hotel sinks into Sadean debauchery, and Rosa is left alone to suffer the psychological and sexual consequences.
Hotel Fear is very difficult viewing, and the film’s treatment of Rosa borders on the sadistic. But its depiction of the site of the hotel as a liminal space of corruption and menace suggests that all tourist fantasies are based on the exploitation of others’ histories, lands, labors, and bodies. Every traveler becomes a trespasser, and every host is simultaneously a vassal. Not since Psycho’s Bates Motel has a film probed the horrible secrets of the hospitality industry in this way.
White Mischief (1987)
White Mischief, adapted from the popular novel of the same name by James Fox, is based on the true story of an unsolved murder among the elites of the so-called Happy Valley, a region of Kenya settled by the British lesser nobility and other aristocratic wastrels in the early 20th century. Its residents, who viewed the East African colony as a private pleasure ground without the laws of the motherland or obligations to the locals, became notorious for debauched parties, swinging orgies, and wild safaris.
The story follows the arrival of the aging Sir Henry “Jock” Broughton and his beautiful young bride, Diana, who quickly becomes the object of interest among the group’s cads and layabouts. Diana begins an affair with the most dashing of them, the philandering earl of Erroll, who is murdered after publicly cuckolding Broughton. Broughton is arrested, and the ensuing trial becomes one of the biggest scandals of the century.
White Mischief falls into something of a sub-subgenre of summer-noir films in which white colonials live out their romantic—or prurient—fantasies in the sun-drenched Third World or the tropical Antipodes. In these films—which also include 1982’s Cecilia, 1983’s Heat and Dust, 1992’s The Lover, and 1993’s Wide Sargasso Sea—sensuality and pleasure are often linked to the (mostly white) body’s encounter with a sunlit landscape, the heat and moisture imprinting some primeval desire for love and passion upon all of the sweat-beaded flesh. In such places, summer becomes a never-ending fantasy, a pleasure dome that characters cannot escape. As one colonial character laments in White Mischief while watching the sunrise, “Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day.”
Bully (2001)
Larry Clark’s exploitation films have always exposed the hidden rituals and games of teenagers, often at their very worst. Beginning with his late-1960s photo book Tulsa and his ’90s films Kids and Ken Park, Clark showed how adolescents from different socioeconomic groups and landscapes throughout America responded to the chaotic freedoms inherent in boredom and anomie. In Bully, he tells the true story of a group of suburban Florida teens who plot to murder one of their own during summer vacation, an act that they justify by claiming that the victim had been a bully and rapist. Apart from the gruesome portrayal of teen violence, part of the film’s disturbance is how such violences can fit seamlessly alongside summery settings and everyday scenes of adolescent leisure: driving aimlessly in a convertible and singing to the radio, playing video games, clubbing, having sex in the backseat of a car.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert claimed that Bully’s compelling message was “not about the evil sadist and the release of revenge; it’s about how a group of kids will do something no single member is capable of. And about the moral void these kids inhabit.” What makes this moral vacuity so much more stark is where it emerges—in a balmy middle-class world that is so often touted as a slice of paradise.
Young Beautiful (2013)
French director François Ozon is the contemporary master of art-house sexploitation, drawing from forebears like Jacques Deray, Roger Vadim, and Éric Rohmer to weave sexy, sometimes lurid stories of pubescent girls blooming into womanhood in summery, pastel-colored landscapes. But in Young Beautiful, he explores life after the salad days of summer return to routine. At the film’s beginning, 17-year-old Isabelle (newcomer Marine Vacth) has her first sexual encounter with an older German boy whom she met while on vacation with her family. It is obvious that Isabelle has fantasized about this moment for most of her adolescence, and her expectations are immense. But the tryst is awkward, brief, and unsatisfying, leaving Isabelle in a deeply alienated state. The boy soon disappears, and summer ends. Returning to the city without the romantic efflorescence that she’d so desired, Isabelle takes the drastic step of becoming a part-time prostitute. Throughout the fall, she meets older men for sex in expensive Parisian hotel rooms. One of her regular clients, a 60-year-old, dies while in the act. The police discover Isabelle’s activities and report them to her family, devastating her mother. Now Isabelle must try to put the remaining pieces of her adolescence back together and live a normal life again.
Young Beautiful tarries at the thin line between bildungsroman and teensploitation, and there is enough young flesh on display to cater to exclusively prurient tastes. Yet the attention with which Ozon captures the meandering of time, whether it be in the transition from summer to fall (the film is split into four sections to measure the changing of the seasons) or from innocence to experience has a resonance that seems to imbue the blossom of youth with an unspoken aura of loss.
Stranger by the Lake (2013)
Alain Guiraudie’s summer noir takes its debauched inspiration not from the young-girl fetish of the French New Wave but the queer imagery of Kenneth Anger, Jean Genet, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose homoerotic themes were always tied intimately with death. That said, Stranger by the Lake begins with the look of a gaycation film, that by-now-familiar cruising story in which a questioning or closeted character travels to a touristed locale to explore his own sexual identity. But protagonist Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) does not have the front-loaded backstory that might anticipate a profound encounter and subsequent transformation. Rather, Franck’s character is as anonymous as his actions: He reappears daily at a lakeshore strewn with naked men to size up and proposition someone for sex in the nearby woods. When he discovers Michel, a Tom Selleck type, his attention is instantly piqued—that is, until he spies his new lover drowning a man in the lake. Instead of reporting the crime, Franck continues his sexual affair with Michel, knowing that his actions could endanger his own life. Whether it is an effect of the isolated and unchanging landscape or his own moral turpitude, Franck cannot let go of Michel.
Stranger by the Lake is a bookend of sorts to La Piscine, as both films seem to condemn their characters—and, by extension, the counterculture surrounding them—to a lassitude incapable of any moral authority. In such a zero-sum world, pleasure is a fantasy that refuses to see beyond its own immediate gratification. After all, when the sun is so bright and the water so warm, who would ever want the summer to end?