SUNDANCE26 REVIEW: Chasing Summer [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 91 minutes
Director(s): Josephine Decker
Writer(s): Iliza Shlesinger

Do you not know what happened?

Twenty years after leaving home and refusing to look back, Jamie’s (Iliza Shlesinger) dreams are about to come true. Five minutes after learning this fact, however, she must first watch it all fall apart. It’s an insane opening scene that often feels like a dream in how it unfolds. Instant jubilation. Disappearing characters. Strangers popping up from below frame. Its mix of comedy, tragedy, hopefulness, and despair perfectly sets the stage for what comes next.

Shlesinger shared during the Q&A for Chasing Summer that she wrote her first draft in 2018 and almost got it made before financing fell apart. She eventually picked it back up, polished its pages, and shopped it around until landing on Josephine Decker’s desk—a fact the latter admits was a surprise since she usually only receives darker subject matter more akin to earlier work Butter on the Latch and Madeline’s Madeline. Production then commenced overnight.

The gist is that Jamie earned a coveted NGO-type gig in Jakarta where the plan is to save lives with her boyfriend (David Castañeda’s Aaron) like they have in numerous other disaster zones. He then chooses that moment to tell her it’s over and that it’s been over for a while. So, with nowhere to stay before the trip, Jamie is forced to return home and face the horror of seeing everyone who turned their backs on her after a slanderous rumor ruined her teenage life.

We’ll eventually learn what that rumor was (as well as its origins), but the only thing we need to know at the start is that it dealt with her high school sweetheart (Tom Welling’s Chase) cheating on her. That betrayal was a real foundational piece that motivated Jamie to always be on the move and to find herself in yet another romantic relationship that fell apart before she could realize it. In many ways, she’s been in suspended animation her entire adult life since.

While not great for Jamie, it’s the perfect backdrop for heartfelt comedy as her arrival unfolds as though she’s still an eighteen-year-old despite being forty. Her parents (Megan Mullally’s Layanne and Jeff Perry’s Randall) treat her like a child with ground rules and an inability to take anything she says seriously. Her older sister Marissa (Cassidy Freeman) is still bullying her and using her position to offer a summer job as reason to do so. And all the old cliques remain intact.

But these realities are skewed since she wasn’t present to experience how they’ve all changed despite looking the same from her vantage point. We must therefore wonder how much of what’s on-screen is real or a result of seeing it from her perspective and biases. Are Amanda (Aimee Garcia) and crew still intimidating or is Jamie projecting that memory onto them? Is Marissa still a hard ass or is Jamie vibing with her twenty-year-old co-worker Harper’s (Lola Tung) impression?

It’s a well-built hybridization between Jamie’s stunted maturity when it comes to home and her self-confidence when it comes to the rest of the world. At times she acts like she’s too good for these people because she made something of herself and rejects the notion that they did so in their own way too. Other times see her rebelling like she’s still a child who can’t be bothered by their demands for responsibility. It’s a perfect storm of petty superiority and entitled brattiness.

The film is pretty much Jamie’s experience reconciling these two halves of herself to discover where the line is. There’s the juxtaposition of lording her growth over them against not allowing herself to see theirs. The mortification of confronting Chase and accepting Aaron dumping her against the appeal of a summer fling with the much younger Colby (Garrett Wareing). And an unwitting ability to find herself doing to everyone what she resents them for doing to her.

With the nostalgia of reliving her twenties so she can reclaim a sense of fun from within a place that only possessed despair, however, is also a reckoning of sorts with the not-quite-true reality she constructed to push her hometown away. That’s not to say Chasing Summer absolves their complicity. Decker and Shlesinger are savvy enough to balance the fact that Jamie’s version of the truth is flawed while the results of that truth upon her identity remain authentic.

That complexity is why this forty-year-old in a twenty-something sex-fueled romcom conceit never folds under its potential for superficial laughs and hijinks. Yes, those things are front and center, but so too is the pain of emotional scars, the shame of discovering the unintentional consequences of the self-absorbed reality of youth, and the humility and maturity to recognize the difference between things that are good and things that merely feel good.

Pay attention to Mullally because her portrayal never sacrifices love for the joke. I love how the relationship between Jamie and Harper is so much more than vicarious living. (“You treat me like a human being.”) And the ways Shlesinger writes Colby, Chase, and Aaron (as well as how their respective actors perform them) to be very different while still adhering to a “type” really adds to Jamie’s struggle to discern between when someone fits and when someone is right.

Give Shlesinger a ton of credit too because she carries the film from the opening frame until a final mid-credit joke. It’s a character that feels lived-in and real despite the cheesy moments and gag-filled antics because nothing she does or says exists outside of the emotional evolution on display. Every laugh has purpose within a relationship, lesson, impulse, or revelation. It’s not about Jamie finding all the answers. It’s about finally understanding what questions to ask.