"Terrible things also happened at the Paris Olympics."

BarcelonaIn the narrative that typically accompanies the celebration of the Olympic Games—especially from the institutions that organize them—there are three recurring elements: effort, success, and transformation. It's as if the cities that host the event, like the athletes, had to experience a dramatic arc of overcoming, an epic race in which there seems to be no room for error or failure. It's against this backdrop of great expectations and triumph that the small story of Blandine, the film's discreet protagonist, unfolds. This summer in Paris, who travels alone from Normandy to the excited and bustling Paris of the recent Olympic Games to watch the swimming competition and reunite with her sister Julie, whom she hasn't seen for ten years. But things don't go as she expects: first, she's stuck outside the Olympic pool because she has nowhere to leave her backpack, and on her 30th birthday, she's expelled from a youth hostel for being overage. Furthermore, despite Blandine's interest in reconnecting with her sister, she seems more interested in rebuilding her sexual and emotional life, which has been disrupted by a recent divorce, than in rekindling old family ties.

This summer in Paris, which premieres this Friday supported by its triumph at the Cinema Jove Festival, is the delicate and sensitive debut film by Valentine Cadic, a young French actress and director who continues the naturalistic tradition of Éric Rohmer in French cinema with a film as luminous as a summer morning. "The story was born from a proposal from my producer: to shoot a film in Paris during the Olympic Games," explains Cadic, who spent two years researching what the event means to a city. "But the film isn't about the Olympic Games, but rather their impact on people," she clarifies. "I wanted to talk about the loneliness of a character, and I thought it was interesting to put it in a context that people usually experience with their friends and family."

Bittersweet loneliness in a hostile city

Indeed, Blandine spends many moments alone during her trip. Through her eyes, we see a Paris that is dressed up and eager to please, but which can also be cold and hostile if you have no money or friends. "When you're alone, any city can be violent, no matter how beautiful it is," notes Cadic, who grew up on the outskirts of Paris. "And it's very easy to feel alone in the middle of an event like the Olympic Games, especially when you're a little lost in life, like Blandine. But that loneliness ends up being the determining factor in its end."

Blandine's fragile life contrasts with the euphoric landscape of the Olympic Games and outlines a discourse that the film complements with notes on the cleaning The French authorities' social media campaign against squatters and anti-capitalist movements in the city. Cadic incorporates real footage of police violence against protesters into the film, a dark side of the Games present in the background. "A few weeks before the Games, they put nearly 20,000 people on a bus and expelled them from Paris," Cadic explains. "So we contacted the association Le Revers de la Médaille, and they sent us videos of what happened. It's important to show that terrible things happened at the Olympic Games too. That said, we're not against them for everyone, starting with the tickets, which are very expensive."

The importance of an actress

For Cadic it was essential that the protagonist ofThis summer in Paris was the actress Blandine Madec, whom she met in 2016 when they coincided as actresses in a short film and whom she later signed to star in her latest short film as a director, The big holidays (2022). With his ordinary, almost vulgar appearance, Madec is a alter ego A peculiar character, so relatable and unaffected that she blurs the lines between reality and fiction. "She's a very good improviser, and in this film, we had to improvise in many scenes because we were working on a real event, which causes changes in the story," explains Cadic. "Plus, she can be very funny, and two seconds later she changes her tone, and you feel a lot of empathy for her. She's a great actress."

Cadic's love of ordinary stories and characters and her talent for showing the extraordinary in ordinary people connect Cadic's films with those of a leading figure of the new French naturalism, Guillaume Brac, the author from that delicious summer tale called In the approach"He was my professor at university!" Cadic reveals. "He taught us a lot about how to write a film and imagine characters." Both she and Brac often integrate real events and ordinary people into their fiction. "Lately, I've seen a lot of films that do this, but I don't know if it's a new movement emerging or if we don't have enough money to make films any other way. In my case, it's a choice: I really like to blend reality with fiction."