Summer’s (Kim Si-a, delivering a beautiful performance) father died a year ago and she enters her first year of high school carrying bits and pieces of him around, perhaps as an attempt to feel closer to him or to try and get closer to an ambiguous death that she herself can’t explain. Hit in the middle of the road while taking photographs, it was maybe not an accident, maybe suicide, and there is nothing that can give her clarity about it: her mother is in the depths of her own grief, still caring and loving, but unreachable at the same time as she is making her own way through her feelings about the death of her husband. She is in the process of packing up her dad’s office, framed photographs on the ground, detritus of him everywhere. Summer, carrying her father’s photobooks, notebooks and watch in her big red backpack, has stopped taking photos herself, which means that there is still an unfinished roll of film in her father’s old analogue Nikon: a perfect symbol for being in the middle of grief, arrested in a moment of time. Finishing the roll would mean developing it, and finding the last things her father cared about enough to take a photo of.
Summer’s Camera is a coming-of-age film that contains within itself the entire history of Summer’s first relationship, from beginning to end. It starts when the school’s adored soccer star Yeon-woo (Yu Ga-eun) accidentally kicks a ball towards her and Summer finds her so arresting that she feels compelled to photograph her. Later, she will describe the feeling as “hearing the shutter click”, a turn of phrase that her father used to describe the feeling of strong emotions in a moment that necessitate capturing it in a picture. Later on her best friend explains she has learned in physics class that moving faster than light slows turn time: but Summer has already figured out how to do that through the lens of her camera.
What makes Summer so compelling is her character is a level of self-certainty, in the midst of all the emotional turmoil of her loss and the things she later finds out about her father, that feels so unusual in a character so young. She has a crush, she pursues that crush. She comes out to her best friend and is supported – her friend isn’t surprised because she’s only ever been interested in photographing girls. None of the drama of the film comes from her not being accepted, or having to fight prejudice. Instead, Summer’s Camera is a film about navigating a relationship with another person who has a whole world of their own inside them, and what happens when their wants and ideas about the future don’t line up with your own: in the case of Yeon-woo, she is less dedicated to Summer than to soccer (it’s interesting how Summer’s passion for photography seems to line up with her relationship to Yeon-woo while Yeon-woo’s passion for soccer is in conflict with it). In the case of Summer’s dad, it’s a world of secrets she discovers once she does develop that final roll of film in the Nikon. What she finds is portrait photographs of a man she has never seen before, after a lifetime of believing her father didn’t take portraits. This stranger turns out to be her father’s lover who has been with him since high school – a man who only finds out about his death from his daughter, and has to work through his own grief while Summer relies on his advice as she navigates her first relationship. It’s tender and tragic to see these two characters, with all the complexities of emotions behind them, keep each other company: Summer the daughter of a man he loved (and very straightforward in her questions, desperate to understand her father better), he the secret that her father kept (and arrested in resentment, in pain), that her mother maybe knew about, but it’s impossible to ask her these questions. The film captures the almost untouchable nature of this man in Summer’s and Maru’s memories of him at different stages of his life: Summer remembers seeing him take photographs in the woods, always at a slight remove from his family, impossible to imagine, she explains to Yeon-woo at some point, as aging into being a grandparent, as if already arrested in time before his death.
It’s like Summer is assembling puzzle pieces to arrive at a more complete picture of her father after his death, coming to terms with the idea that he had a whole world inside of him that she didn’t have access to before: but the final puzzle piece is an affirmation of his love, when she finally goes through the final photos on the digital camera he used right before the accident. It’s a moment where she sees herself, photographed with the same love and devotion, asserting her own place in her father’s life, loved and cherished the way he showed his devotion.
2025, directed by Divine Sung, starring Kim Si-a, Yu Ga-eun, Kwak Min-gyu.
