“Summertime” is the sophomore feature by Carlos López Estrada. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival and was funded by the Los Angeles Media Fund. It stars 25 members of the Los Angeles poetry organization Get Lit.
Summertime is streaming on SF Indiefest
“Summertime” follows the lives of several underprivileged angelenos in the span of a single day. We witness them eating and searching for a specific burger chain, visiting therapists and councillors, hustling in the rap game, and battling their demons, all of it delivered by a group of young poets from LA in a way reminiscent of a musical but using slam poetry instead of song.
Had Carlos Lopez focused only on taking the conventions of musicals such as “La La Land” and subverting them using poetry instead of song, “Summertime” would've been a much more coherent film. Instead, he tries to make an inspirational hyperlink film which is also a love letter to Los Angeles. This, sadly, results in a movie which seems to not know what it wants to, nor it knows what it aims to say. Let's take the hyperlink aspect as an example. Whereas in other works of fiction, for example Nick Bradley's “The Cat and the City”, this structure is used to tell an intertwined story and complex story, here there is no meaningful interconnection between the storylines of each of the characters. Yes, they chance upon each other, but that's about it, making the entire story feel more like a series of vignettes that were somehow haphazardly connected, rather than a coherent work.
Most of the problems of this otherwise beautifully shot and edited film seem to come from the script. Written by Lopez together with the main cast of poet-actors, most of whom play versions of themselves, the story feels too naive, childish even. The semi-fictional LA inhabited by the characters is filled with “freaks” and “strange” people who, despite the writers' aims to portray them as complex, cannot but feel like stereotypes. Though one of the reasons for that might be the fact that for its hour-an-a-half, “Summertime” is crammed to the brim with characters, some of which have just a few minutes of screen time, it looks like it is due to inept and self-centered writing. The last if very apparent in the fact that absolutely everyone except for the main characters, all of whom have contributed to the script and have written the poetry pieces they perform, seem like caricatures who are there simply there to make the poets look like better people.
The same can be seen in the use of non-Black and non-Latino characters and locations such as the Korean restaurant which though featured as a set of a poetry sequence, is ultimately used as just one of many stops on Tyris' (Tyris Winter) Yelp quest for the best burger. This presents a very twisted and hierarchal image of the city and its people. We cannot but read in that contemporary shallow self-centeredness. This, sadly, is seen in some of the poetry, especially the so-shallow-that-it's-cringy closing piece which manages to feel both like an depthless inspirational piece filled with cliches and a suicide note.
That being said, not all of the writing is as bad. Some of the poems are very honest and impactful, feeling like glimmers of honesty in a sea of fakeness and self-obsession. However, none of them manage to save the film from being a shallow work that pretends to be much more profound than it actually is.
