Infinite Summer

Normally, filmmakers from smaller countries end up looking for work in larger ones with more established markets. Miguel Llansó is one of the strange few who took the other path. A Spanish filmmaker who spent many years living in Ethiopia, Llansó now calls Tallinn, Estonia home and teaches film at the Baltic Film and Media School (the Estonian National Film School). His new psychedelic and AI-skeptical low-fi science-fiction film Infinite Summer is his latest production within his new country of residence (previous: Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway) and it perfectly fits into the contemporary Estonian film landscape with its ironic genre play, strange sexual verve, and popping embrace of quirky digital visuals.

The shy and sweet Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock) looks forward to spending summer break with her childhood friend Grete (Johanna-Aurelia Rosin), returning to Tallinn from university in London. Grete brings Sarah (Hannah Gross), a Canadian friend who dreaded going back to the Great White North for the summer, back with her. The two college women enjoy each other’s company at a cost to Mia. Avoiding a new woman-crush on Sisi (Sissi Nylia Benita), Mia instead spends regrettable time on an augmented reality dating app with a creep named Dr. Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies) who gives her a strange respiratory device that induces strange video-gamey hallucinations and altered-reality (and, um, tentacley) orgasms. 

The colorful and fruity world on the other side of the new technology provides an image of a different, more pleasure-centered summer that attracts a lonely and vulnerable Mia. The ultrawidescreen canvas makes the world too large for the young woman struggling to find her place in it. Others enter and exit through the walls of the aspect ratio that traps Mia within it like a video game character or an animal in a zoo.  

From digital privacy and artificial intelligence skepticism to queer sexual awakenings and spiraling mental health, the short 94 minutes run amok in thematic material. Throughout it all, Infinite Summer refuses to be boring. Sometimes it gets absurd, as with the furry-adjacent AI zoo-keeper (voiced by Denise Moreno) and the “whoo-hoo” voice that narrates Mia’s hallucinatory world. But the incredibly caffeinated energy complements the big emotions Mia experiences as she begins to disconnect with Grete. The end of relationships, even platonic ones, can carry a nebulously apocalyptic weight. As her emotional world changes, so too does her real world as she moves from the real one into a virtual / augmented one.

Llansó’s Estonia is not one of a tourist but of a local. He avoids Old Town (beyond one line of dialogue) and Mia spends much of her time floating away on an isolated summer lake. The scary adoption of emerging technologies plays coy with the country’s reputation as a technological haven. AI isn’t all bad in Infinite Summer, though. Interpol agents take notice of Dr. Mindfulness’s breathing contraption and accept AI’s help to locate their target. The Estonian stage and theater veteran Katariina Unt, who will be recognizable to almost anyone familiar with the country’s cinema, plays one of the two Interpol agents and brings a steely coolness (she even wears sunglasses) that adds more than a hint of irony to the low-fi film. 

A curious sexual energy floats throughout the film that Llansó never fully activates. Cinematography Israel Seoane makes an early scene of the three girls eating ice cream into a scene of sapphic gazing and slow-motion licks so horny a nun would need to blink twice. Mia does nothing to win the attention of her new crush, so the lip-locking she engages in at the end doesn’t reward. Mia’s friends also put her in a scary scenario with a man, and though there should be a sense of danger, no one, not even Mia, recognizes this. The scene could have been crucial in establishing any metaphors for the consent-violating and abusive technology and patriarchal sexual power; instead, it’s oblivious to its own potential.