From Omeleto.
Two lovers enjoy their summer.
SUMMER SOUNDTRACK is used with permission from Artemis Snow. Learn more at https://artemissnow.com.
Kyra and Jake have fallen in love, spending lazy summer afternoons and rhapsodic evenings together. They take trips; they lie in fields. But most of all, they love listening to music together, especially one song that captures their emotions and imagination.
The summer seems almost suspended in time, suspending Kyra and Jake in an endless moment of tenderness and love. But life continues to wear on, taking both lovers in unpredictable directions, forever linked by the tether of music and memory.
Directed and written by Artemis Snow and co-directed by Haley Luciani, this lyrical romantic short captures the ineffable feeling of summer love in its very form, delicately weaving song, image, light, color and movement to evoke both timelessness and specificity. Using a mosaic format in its storytelling, it weaves together these elements, suspending and elongating them like precious shards of sense-memories that stand apart from a larger context or narrative, then jumping to another shardlike piece. But slowly, these individual pieces coalesce, revealing a breathtaking meditation on not just summer love, but what it means to have and be a soulmate.
The cinematography is sunlit, warm and golden in tone, bathing Kyra and Jake into almost iconic evocations of hazy, warmly plangent summertime. Their time together is defined by its sensuousness, with both often comfortable sharing silence, movement and emotion. The only sound beyond the outside world is often the music they both love, which forms the soundtrack of their car rides and their epic hangs. One song in particular comes to define their time together; it echoes in the film, a reminder and evocation of their relationship and their feelings for each other, even when the other isn’t there.
The shape of the narrative isn’t linear, feeling much like how memory itself feels. Accordingly, the performances by actors Artemis Snow and Justin Chien as Kyra and Jake don’t feel linear as well — they’re more like embodiments of feeling and thought, existing in the moment and for one another. Though often silent, they’re connected, building a deep well of memory and emotion. As they create this shared store of memory together, they are also helping to build one another’s selves. And as this mosaic of sensation and feeling begins to form a more cohesive picture, we finally can place ourselves in a more linear timeline — which reveals an unexpected direction for the pair.
This reveal gently pulls the film’s concerns of romantic and summer love into something more philosophical or even existential. In a culture where fairy tales of love often lead to "happily ever after," the full shape of SUMMER SOUNDTRACK reveals itself as a narrative that sees love as an experience we go through, one that often redefines or expands who we are in a soulful, generous and intimate way. Love isn’t a destination, but how two people help one another become who they are. It suffuses us with gratefulness for the "what ifs" and helps us appreciate what we have right now.
