A Burning Hot Summer

In A Burning Hot Summer (a pulpy title that sounds better in the original, "Un Été Brûlant), two men fall into friendship, and while little happens, everything is at stake.

There are subtler, more allusive films about stormy conflicts of the heart, but A Burning Hot Summer wisely knows when and how to surgically slice directly to the bone. It's a bad romance of the highest order.

Although Angèle's religious faith and Frédéric's belief in luck seem like strained attempts at adding heft to the material, the film nevertheless works up a potent dramatic restlessness, derived from the push-pull between an entitled, obsessive Frédéric and Bellucci's quietly chaotic Angèle.

A Burning Hot Summer failed to persuade me of any reason for its existence.

The Louis Garrel character's mixture of self-containment and alleged possessiveness over his wife fails to convince, if not to irritate.

It's apt that the Rome weather in this stodgy film, contrary to the title, seems quite temperate.