What is the purpose of film? To take the viewer into a new world and present unusual experiences in a visceral way, so as to impact an audience to an extreme? Is it to document true events as they occur, chronicling history with utmost care? Or perhaps the purpose of film is to simply present you with images and a story. While this has been a question for filmmakers since the invention of the moving-picture camera, “Summer Season” director David Dean seems much more interested in the old maxim, “Have camera, will travel.”
The film is set a few months after the outbreak of the third World War in 2012. America, losing an enormous number of its brave young men and women to the international fighting, has reinstated the draft. “Summer Season” follows two youths, Kit and Alex, on a cross-country road trip in search of a hippy refuge called Whale’s Mouth. As they crawl through the desert, they see America in a halfhearted, almost apocalyptic, state. Believing they will be sheltered from the horrors of war by a pot-growing commune, the two draft-dodgers find both sanctuary and fear in the open road. Told in an original style heavily influenced by the handheld “reality” movement and the “ecstatic truth” documentaries of Werner Herzog, “Summer Season” represents what may be a new approach to filmmaking.
Shot for a little over 700 dollars over the period of a college winter break, “Summer Season” looks its budget. That said, production value isn’t everything, and the film firmly clinches its lo-fi aesthetic. Produced by a three-man crew (two of which play the film’s leads), “Summer Season” was shot on location during a ten-day road trip the group took. Altering reality only slightly for the sake of narration, the film presents a stylized rendition of the actual world with non-actors playing themselves in a frighteningly possible story set only four years in the future.
Though not without its flaws, “Summer Season” is nonetheless an inspired film. Beautiful locations and a good premise pick up some of the slack left by the clearly inexperienced actors, offering a short feature that explores the more cinematic possibilities of today’s digital technology. The film plays like a handheld version of Larry Clark’s “KIDS,” except centered on the American Doomsday rather than an HIV positive punk.
If you are a person who has thought long hours over my first question, it is possible that your answer may well affect what you would think of this film. It shows you a common world in an ordinary light, but everything is stained with the faint color of a storyteller’s hand. A film going in so many directions at once may not be for everyone, but “Summer Season” is still well worth seeing.
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