Motorcycle Summer

When you perfect something, you can either chase the white whale again or find a new pursuit. Most directors choose the former. Latvian director Uldis Brauns is of the rarer breed that prefers the latter. A key figure in the Baltic poetic documentary movement, he only ever made one feature fiction film and it is the Latvian answer to The Graduate. Motorcycle Summer, a black and white 1975 summertime romance and motorcycle film about a dissatisfied young bride who hops on a stranger’s motorcycle and runs away, is one of the region’s cinematic highpoints. 

Māris (Peteris Gaudins) just turned 18 and his parents reluctantly gift him a motorcycle to celebrate. He goes on a birthday joyride with his biker friends and they meet a wedding entourage. The bride-to-be is Irene, played by a 15-year-old Inese Jansone. She loses her veil out of the car window in a premonitory scene and hops on Māris’s bike as her husband and the others fish the veil from a tall tree. Very little of her fiancé is shown, but Irene does call him a “jerk” over the phone and shows no interest in him or emotional investment when they are in the car. For the most part, her deep unhappiness has little to do with the man she swore to marry. 

Just like the changing seasons, the summer romance genre usually ends in sadness or even tragedy. Motorcycle Summer (Motociklu vasara) always has that looming disappointment hanging over Māris’s and Irene’s time together. At some point, the two teenagers must return home; running away forever never comes across as a realistic option for them. They are also not in love. There is an instant attraction between the two, but even that is motivated by the liberatory power to make choices for oneself. The bike, regardless of its rider, represents a way out for the unhappy young woman. 

In the scene where she asks for a motorcycle ride, she first roams her eyes over his bike as if she were sexually gazing. The motorcycle as a phallic symbol has been a non-insignificant part of the motorcycle film since its inception, and that is related to the sub-genre’s preference for anti-establishmentarian themes and rebellious counter-cultural aesthetics. The bike is the freest and most libertine mode of personal transportation. The driver goes where they want and can weave in and out of the larger and more conforming vehicles in traffic. Motorcyclists also ride on their bikes alone or, at most, with one other person. They are more individualistic than cars, hence one reason why the motorcycle film is a typically American invention. That makes Brauns’ Brezhnev-era employment of the Western sub-genre an intriguing historical anomaly that voices a larger aspiration of personal freedom. 

Māris’s and Irene’s brief fling takes them all over Soviet Latvia. The film begins with images of a group of motorcycles transposed over white horses running in fields. Braun’s two cinematographers, Kalvis Zalcmanis and Ivars Seleckis, both of whom were also first documentarians, clash the urban and mechanical dragons with the classically idyllic images of free horses sprinting in beautiful and unadulterated meadows. The opening shots later gain additional meaning through a childhood fable Irene repeats from her grandmother, making the contrast between the masculine-motorcycle and feminine-horse easier to articulate. They don’t go together. In addition to foreshadowing the couple’s incompatibility, the two images transposed over each other weave both rural and urban Latvia into one metanarrative. The country comes together in their affair. Their multiday runaway tour of the countryside and small towns pulls all sorts of compatriots — from a choir to an old married couple to a middle-aged drunk — into their pursuit of autonomy and young love.

Inese Jansone’s young age may startle many viewers even if there is nothing too lewd about this summer romance. It will also, at times, make them uncomfortable. This is her only credited acting role other than the reunion documentary about the production made a few years ago. Her Irene rarely looks her age though. (I asked my partner to age her from a random photo and 36 was my partner’s best guess, airing on the high side in anticipation of a shocking answer.) The Soviet Union’s age of consent seems to have been undefined at the time, even though women reached a legally marriageable age at 16. Instead, the standard prohibited sexual acts with “persons who have not achieved sexual maturity.” And, for what it’s worth to Americans who, for some baffling reason, have assumed 18 is the standard here (it’s not in most states), the age of consent in Sweden and Argentina is currently 15. All of that is to help contextualize North American cultural uncomfortability. And, like I said, it avoids the salacious anyway.

The Latvian classic should be remembered not for the age of its actors but for its sublime cinematography. Brauns is one of the most important figures behind the Baltic poetic documentary movement; both of his cinematographers also knew their way around creating patient and poetic images. They put forward some of their best work in this collaboration too. Motorcycle Summer is simply and honestly one of the prettiest films I’ve seen. In 1978, black and white was a deliberate choice. The white of Inese’s wedding dress visually complements but thematically contrasts with the black of Māris’s cool-guy jacket and bike. A heavy fog covers the air for much of the short 70-minute runtime and that helps to move the horizon lower and on top of where Brauns often frames the couple, allowing the darkness of Māris’s costume to punctuate the fuzzy white sky and for the white of Inese’s dress to do the same with the darker, often meadowy, ground. It’s a thoroughly brilliantly composed film. 

The images are more than pretty too. Speaking about the Baltic poetic documentary tradition, Anupma Shanker, film curator and audio-visual archives researcher, writes “Baltic filmmakers married Vertov’s enchantment with the world around him with a desire to circumvent the propaganda-centric leitmotifs of Soviet-era cinema, rejecting the ideological demand to view life through an idealised lens and instead focusing on the ‘ordinary’, forcing viewers to engage with the less-than-perfect but deeply human images of the USSR’s subjects on their own merit.” It was a very political style by being apolitical. No film attests to this more than Brauns’ own narration and interview-free portrait of the 235 million diverse people living across the USSR in 235 000 000 (1967). He doesn’t need the usual narration to dictate a message about life for the average Soviet. The images speak for themselves. We should remember this when watching his fictional Motorcycle Summer. Who the couple stays with, the stories they tell each other, the places they go on their “honeymoon,” and the choices they make also paint a story about life in 1975 Latvia.

Motorcycle Summer is currently streaming on Klassiki and is also available for free from the National Film Centre of Latvia’s online collection of Latvian classics.