Sweetly titled, The Summer of Sangaile is a coming of age tale centered on a budding relationship between two young women. The mood is breezy and insouciant, perhaps more the stuff of spring. In the film’s opening, the titular Sangaile (the perfectly gamine Julija Steponaityte), just shy of 18, gazes up at stunt planes, high in the sky and turning loop after loop at a local aeronautics show where she meets Auste (Aiste Dirziute), a forward and cheery girl who rigs a raffle and extends a series of invitations: to the beach, to the canteen where she works.
She’s more a sunny stranger than a seductress, while Sangaile is a closed book, approaching with equal parts curiosity and caution. The two acquaint themselves in a gentle way, playing dress-up in Auste’s handmade fashions, best resembling an elementary schoolteacher’s thrift shop score: kitschy outfits with retro silhouettes and playfully mismatched buttons. They soon become lovers after tiptoeing around each other with innocuous gazes and tape measuring. Devoid of mind games, their trajectory is not steamy or calculated stuff. All tenderness, little lust.
Writer and director Alanté Kavaïté too lends a delicate approach, particularly when filming the young actresses’ love scenes. Tutus outfitted with glowing lights act as a veil during Sangaile and Auste’s first sexual encounter, as if to prevent onlookers from infringing on their privacy. Kavaïté shoots the warm tumble of limbs between gauzy silks, providing a privileged glimpse at their intimacy. In another scene, a ceiling mobile outfitted with reflective squares casts a dizzying light about the room like a carousel, no doubt mirroring Sangaile’s state of mind.
The film takes place in the woody green retreat of the Lithuanian countryside, Kavaïté’s home country. Sunlight looms through the trees and field, and the camera captures the expanse of the long summer day where freedom is never scant, as the girls come and go as they please, swimming at the lake or lazing in the grass. The setting resists technological indicators of modern life and, combined with the script’s reserved dialogue, renders the film as a near silent one. The actresses, relative newcomers, aptly capture the relationship and its fresh sincerity, but the script coaxes out little beyond mid-level emotional textures. Additionally boosting the girls’ free rein is the limited presence of adults, though parental antagonism crops up in Sangaile’s mother, an ex-ballerina. Their rift and Sangaile’s moodiness can slide without explanation; chalk it up to routine adolescence. But, her self-mutilation (arm cutting with dividers) seems swept under, or up with, the film’s romantic airs. Auste’s companionate cutting is curious, if not disturbing.
It occurs too late in the film that Sangaile suffers vertigo, complicating her fascination with planes and desire to pilot one. It’s ultimately less a plot revelation than a narrative metaphor for Sangaile and her inner life, and a clichéd one that she does eventually encapsulate, as she overcomes, soars, reaches the sky, etc. A competent piece of filmmaking, The Summer of Sangaile remains sedate, never breaking the sunlight-induced torpor of youth, and it will likely be regarded with hazy remembrance—not at all unlike real summers of teenage years past.