‘The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer’ Review: Argentinian Doc

Raised on the wide-horizoned pampas beyond Buenos Aires, two Argentinean girl cousins — Guillermina “Guile” Aranciaga and Belinda “Beli” Stutz — spend their time playing make-believe and goofing off, become teenagers and then women with children of their own in The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, photographer-turned-filmmaker Alessandra Sanguinetti’s luminous, indelible documentary.

Shot over 25 years from 1999 onwards, this cinematic work evolved from an earlier project that resulted in exhibitions and books, which also recorded, in large-format photos, Guile and Beli’s child-to-adult evolution. Indeed, Sanguinetti can be heard out-of-frame talking to the girls, or taking another shot with her still camera, sometimes popping in front of the lens for a cameo appearance like a fellow playmate who just happens to be 20 or so years older than the kids.

Yet the film, developed with grants from Sundance, produced by filmmaker Julia Solomonoff and acquired by Mubi, has its own integral coherence and doesn’t feel like an addendum or just another chapter; it’s a freestanding, self-sufficient work in its own right with its own unique relationship to the subjects, albeit one that’s more linear and tidily narrational than collections of curated photographs.

It’s never explained in the film, but Sanguinetti has mentioned in interviews that she started out photographing the animals on the girls’ grandmother’s farm and effectively got interested in the human children when they kept getting in the way. It’s easy to see from the grainy camcorder footage that when Beli was eight and Guile was 10, they were already a force of nature, an irrepressible double act full of curiosity, energy and imagination.

Over the years, we see them pretending to be a priest (Beli, with an eyeliner-drawn mustache) officiating at a funeral while Guile hams it up as a grief-stricken widow. At other times, they are a courting couple, or friends like Thelma and Louise, driving off (in a broken-down truck) to their new life in Buenos Aires, admiring the imaginary scenery as they speed past it.

Throughout the movie, the two also dance together to Argentinean pop or more traditional gaucho music, sometimes rehearsed performances, sometimes more spontaneous bops. When we get to a point nearly two-thirds of the way in, and Beli, pregnant and beaten down by this point with the realities of married life, says she doesn’t dance much anymore, it’s a tragic moment, the dissolution of childhood joy before our eyes in the vat of time.  

Thankfully, Sanguinetti knows she can’t let the film watch her subjects slide into despair as they exchange experience for innocence. There are dance sequences to come, and delight to be had as their own kids demonstrate the same ferocious capacity for imaginative play in later years. The two women drift apart in their teens and 20s for a while, but there’s a wry kind of fairy tale coda in the section where they travel to Paris for an exhibition of Sanguinetti’s pictures of them and end up posing for a spread in Vogue Italia in all kinds of fancy clothes. In books like The Ongoing Moment, the English writer Geoff Dyer wonderfully expounds on the see-saw of time in photographs, the way they sometimes portend the future. We get that happening in action here when we see the girls in their tween years, dressing up in the granny’s high heels and jewelry, pretending they’re wearing Versace. As it turns out, in the future they’ll get gussied up in Marni and Nina Ricci, but who’s counting?

What is above all so cherishable in this work, and in Sanguinetti ‘s photographs seen here, is that there is no patronage or pity for Beli and Guile. They are, presumably unlike Sangiunetti herself, working-class folk who are unlikely to go off and become artists abroad, but still they have their own dreams, their own ways of seeing the world and they feel as much like collaborators here as subjects of Sanguinetti’s gaze.

Andrés Tambornino’s rhythmic editing pulls together the disparate kinds of stock and material, helping to create a strong sense of forward momentum throughout. Like the canal the two girls like to go swimming in as kids, their lives are never the same each time Sanguinetti’s lenses dip into them.