HItze makes you sluggish and from there it is not far to melancholy. A feeling that you feel particularly well in the evening when the sun is no longer quite as high and throws a reddish light into the room or over wheat fields. When everything feels “beautiful and terrible at the same time”, as the protagonist says in “The Taste of Apple Seeds”. Artists have always thought of something about long summer days that make you sad in a beautiful way. We’ve compiled a list of the best movies, books, and songs as sweet and heavy as low-hanging fruit.
Movie
Stand by Me – The secret of a summer
A man reads in the newspaper about the death of another man who was once his best friend. The summer she and two other friends packed their backpacks and went in search of a boy’s body. The news had been reporting his disappearance for days. The film is based on a novella by Stephen King and is accordingly accompanied by a gentle shudder. At the same time, the hike of the four has the charm of a road movie, complete with obstacles and emotional outbursts. It’s about parents who don’t understand you, about youthful honor and the desolation of small towns. Above all, however, it is about childhood friendships that no longer exist and yet remain the most important ones in life. Last sentence: “I’ve never had friends as good as they had when I was twelve. Does anyone have it?”
Gilbert Grape – Somewhere in Iowa
Lived desolation: A job in the supermarket, an affair with the married neighbor, the father hanged himself in the basement, the mother is so fat that she no longer leaves the house, the brother is mentally handicapped. Gilbert Grape doesn’t have many reasons to look forward to the next day. He lives in a backwater somewhere in the US state of Iowa, where the most exciting thing is the reopening of a bad burger joint. But the balloons make everything even sadder. Then Gilbert falls in love with Becky, who is passing through, and faint hope shimmers in the lack of prospects. Despite all the sadness, a beautiful film about love and new beginnings.
Call me by your Name
In no film is summer more sensual than in this one. We’re in Italy, it’s hot, only the big country house is cool. A multilingual Jewish intellectual family hosts a graduate student from the USA. Elio, the son of the house, and Oliver, the graduate student, fall in love. In the midst of richly draped apricot trees, swimming trunks drying in the bathtub and young people’s first attempts at sex. But it’s the 80s and love is even more complicated than it already is. The film is the feeling of eating a peach after a long swim in the sun and then dozing off on freshly washed sheets in the late afternoon. At the same time, however, it is also the feeling of the first great love that doesn’t last.
Thelma and Louise
A classic of summer melancholy and for all lovers of road movies: the friends Thelma and Louise flee from the police – in the car through the USA. One shot a man who wanted to rape the other. At first in panic, they drive from motel to diner in a convertible, always on, picking up a very young Brad Pitt on the way. The longer the flight lasts, the more self-confident their initially emotional vigilantism becomes. They drive through the desert states in the direction of Mexico, with a pistol in their hand luggage. towards their sad and beautiful end.
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisters
In the southern United States, summer melancholy still seems a little more penetrating than elsewhere. In hot Louisiana, the Ya-Ya sisters – four friends – talk about their lives and a complicated mother-daughter relationship. The film jumps back and forth between their different phases of life. We see young women getting a fresh breeze in a convertible in their underwear, playing “drown” at the lake and flying over the surrounding fields in a helicopter. At the same time, but also mourning missed careers, killed fiancés and lost sanity. Bad manners in beautiful dresses that are particularly good to look at on summer evenings.
Books
Hello Sadness
A summer on the French Riviera that ends in a presumed suicide. “Bonjour Tristesse” made Françoise Sagan famous and gave her a scandal. It was too sexual, too explicit, for the 1950s France in which it appeared. The book is about 17-year-old Cécile, who lives with her father in decadence and carelessness. When the father finally marries, i.e. wants to become a middle-class man, Cécile plans an intrigue to get rid of the unwanted woman. With success. The beauty of sun and sea and the south of France serves as a backdrop for vanity and youthful selfishness. The characters are equally attractive and repulsive and thus form the perfect basis for a depressingly fascinating summer book: “Then something arises in me that I greet with my eyes closed with its name: Welcome grief.”
Hard Land
Benedict Wells, although German, knows that summer melancholy works best in the US. His novel “Hard Land” is set there in the 80s in the state of Missouri. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the already mentioned “Stand by me” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” (also a summer melancholy recommendation). Again it is about a melancholic youth in a small town. Sam got a summer job at an old movie theater. There he makes friends and falls in love for the first time. But he mourns his mother’s cancer and her death. He writes sad songs on the guitar. At the same time he is young and in love and wants to jump off the cliff into the sea with his friends. A nice book for the summer. Funny, despite all the melancholy.
The Great Gatsby
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, it’s so hot that the only way for the characters to cool off is with blocks of ice and champagne. Fortunately, almost all of them are rich. It’s the 1920s and there’s a thirst for debauchery and vanity. Nick Carraway tells the story more from the sidelines. About the great love between the mysterious Jay Gatsby and his cousin, the beautiful Daisy. The two are so in love with their love that they bury everything under it. No hot summer fairy tale without at least one dead person. In this case there are two. A classic that doesn’t cool you down, but makes the heat shimmer a little nicer.
Who disturbs the nightingale
Many may associate Harper Lee’s classic with tedious school reading. But a new look at the novel is worthwhile. It’s set in southern Alabama, where the moss-covered trees grow and alligators lurk in bodies of water. Everything revolves around the trial of black Tom Robinson and his defense attorney Atticus Finch. But also about the lawyer’s children, Scout and Jem, and the mysterious Boo Radley, who remains hidden in his house. The novel is set in the 1930s but was published in the middle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In it, Harper Lee, a longtime friend of Truman Capote, describes the heat of the southern states and the heat of temper. And how to alleviate them.
The taste of apple seeds
Katharina Hagena’s novel has what every dark summer story needs: a secret. After the death of her grandmother, Iris drives to her house where she spent her summers when she was young. A large property with a garden full of apple trees. Here she played “Sink or Die” with her cousin and a friend. One of them has to eat blindfolded what the others put in her mouth. Whether zucchini or earthworm. Back in the home of her youth, Iris begins to decipher old family stories and how her cousin died in an accident. The novel tells of youthful wildness, which can sometimes be cruel. About broken families who still love each other. And the melancholy of childhood.
Music
Summertimes Sadness
Actually, all of Lana del Rey’s albums could be right here. The songs are so sweet and heavy like they’re soaked in honey. Accordingly, the music videos – also for Summertime Sadness – are immersed in an old Hollywood retro look. She sings about farewell. Of fast driving along the coast and the buzzing of telephone poles: “If I go, I’ll die happy tonight”. The synthesizer and the breathy voice of the singer sound heavy. How well it goes together with summer melancholy is also shown by the fact that she contributed the theme song to a film adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” (2013): Young and Beautiful.
Summer Wine
“It feels like a song from a Tarantino movie,” commented one YouTube user. For example, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” would be appropriate. When Sharon Tate drives through the hot city in a convertible. The song was written by Lee Hazlewood in 1966 and only became successful as a duet with country singer Nancy Sinatra. It is about a traveler with silver spurs who is seduced by a woman to drink wine. From the sweet mixture of “strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring”, the stranger becomes more and more dizzy. Until he finally falls asleep and wakes up robbed. When the sun wakes him up, he still only wants one thing: more summer wine.
Memory of a Free Festival
Summer also includes music festivals. They are home to a very special feeling of melancholy, of a slight intoxication and constant bass. “The children of late summer gathered in the damp grass. We played our songs and felt the London sky.” David Bowie wrote the song in 1969 and sings about a music festival in London. And the drugs and love exchanged along the way. At the end it keeps booming “The solar machine is coming down and we’re going to have a party”. When the song came out, it wasn’t particularly successful. All the more reason to rediscover them now. Because the sun is slowly going down and we should celebrate.
Summer‘s almost gone
“Summer’s almost over,” sings The Doors’ Jim Morrison in a heavy voice. And: “When the summer is over, where will we be”? A question that cannot be separated from the summer melancholy. When the warm, sweet days end and you don’t know how it’s going to be after that. Without the lake, swimming and the long nights. They are still there. But you can only enjoy them sadly. Because it is clear: they will end.
Boys of Summer
Nothing is more beautiful and terrible than a love that only lasts one summer. Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” is about this lost summer love. About her brown skin and her sunglasses on her face. He can still see her from afar, wants to let go, but can’t. When listening to the song, a dusty Cadillac in the evening light, sand on the asphalt and a car radio that you turn on with a push button immediately appear in your mind’s eye. If you like it particularly melancholic, it’s best to listen to the cover version of First Aid Kit from this year.
These were just a few of many recommendations to watch, read or hear during this late summer time. And the thought that such great films as “Little Miss Sunshine” and “My Girl” didn’t make it into the selection makes me melancholic again.