The song “The Cure” inspired the Italian-French film “My Summer with Irène”

“My summer with Irène”

Courtesy of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Listening to The Cure’s 1992 song “To Wish Impossible Things” was a major inspiration for Italian filmmaker Carlo Sironi when writing the Italian-French drama with Silvana Tamma as co-writer and director. My summer with Irène.

“The young and shy Clara meets the spirited Irène,” says a plot description on the website of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where the film was shown last week in the festival’s Horizons section. “These two girls with completely different personalities are brought together by their recent battle with an illness that has changed their outlook on life in the midst of their vulnerable teenage years. When they spontaneously decide to spend some time by the sea, it feels like they are actually trying to stop time.”

The idea came quite spontaneously. “The way this film started is a bit strange for me,” Sironi told an audience at the 58th Karlovy Vary Festival during a Q&A session after a screening. “I think some ideas come in a very logical way. We do some research, we look for inspiration or whatever (that’s what I did) for my last film (sole) was like. It was a very logical, very step-by-step film.”

So what does the English rock band and their song about lost love and lost dreams have to do with his latest film? “Basically, I was listening to The Cure’s song that plays in the end credits, just two weeks before shooting” his first film sole“In those four and a half minutes, I began to see many images from the film – of Clara, of the island, of the illness. And basically I just wrote down one or two pages and then put them in a drawer.”

All this came as a surprise to the director. Only when he had finished sole and went back to the notes and ideas he had jotted down, he realized something. “I couldn’t understand at first why I had this idea,” he told the audience. “It wasn’t until I started working on the film that I recognized in these two girls the character and personality of two very close friends of mine from high school. They were very close and had a very strong, special friendship. The end of their friendship was very dramatic, but not due to illness.”

Sironi concluded: “So for me it was strange. There was something imaginary… and something related to my memory and something personal. And I had to mix these two things” and then also interview young people with illnesses.