‘The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer’ Locarno Review: Friendship, Time, and the Lives We Imagine
Over 25 years, two cousins grow up before the camera, their shared dreams confronting reality as time reshapes their friendship and the world around them.
Capturing an entire life—or even a substantial portion of one—on film is no simple task. It depends on dozens of variables, some of them intangible. And when the lives in question are two rather than one, the challenge becomes even more complex. The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer takes on that challenge and, in its own particular way, becomes a portrait of two friends who live in the countryside, whom the filmmaker observes growing from childhood into adulthood over the course of a quarter century.
Set in a rural area of Buenos Aires province that the film rarely leaves—there’s almost no contextual detail about where exactly we are; it feels like a generic stretch of the Argentine pampas, though it was shot around General Guido and Dolores—the story follows two cousins, Guille and Belinda (Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz). Close friends, they share games, dreams and experiences within a space of imagination where anything seems possible: singing, dressing up, fantasizing about fame, imagining future children.
Though structured as a dual portrait, the film is in fact about three people, since the filmmaker—an acclaimed Argentine-American photographer—shares many of these moments with them while also photographing the girls for a parallel project focused on the same subjects in a far more formal register. These are carefully staged, more elegant portraits that ultimately capture the same dreams and aspirations, only rendered differently (Note: the images illustrating this review come from that project).
What most distinctly binds both projects is the passage of time. Sanguinetti—older than her subjects—filmed and photographed Guille and Belinda over 25 years, beginning in 1999 with a fairly rudimentary camera, when the girls were nine and ten. She follows them into the present, where their lives have changed dramatically—often in ways quite different from what they once imagined—and have included unexpected experiences, estrangements, reunions, and other turns best left unrevealed.
Like Boyhood or, closer to home, The Prince of Nanawa, the documentary becomes a portrait of time itself: of friendship, of life’s transformations, of what is dreamed and what (generally) fails to materialize. In the background, the parallel photographic project gradually gains weight, eventually shaping the protagonists’ lives and experiences. The project—both exhibition and film—becomes part of their identity, not merely something that accompanies them. Cinema here observes them but also addresses them, contains them yet continually rediscovers them.
roduced by Julia Solomonoff and backed by MUBI, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is, indirectly, also a film about 21st-century Argentina, a place where dreams and reality exist in a state of constant friction. While Sanguinetti doesn’t delve deeply into her subjects’ inner contradictions—there’s a certain lack of psychological interiority—the film compensates with patient observation, an empathetic and contemplative gaze upon these girls turned women and the world that surrounds them. It’s a film about friendship, but also about the sky, the wind, the stream, the cows—and time, which transforms everything.
