Hesitantly walking through the streets of Paris while carrying a dorky multicoloured backpack, the 30-year-old Blandine (Blandine Madec) is not the type of person that you often see in the lead role of a light romantic(ish) comedy like That Summer in Paris (Valentine Cadic, 2025). Attending the Olympics on her own to follow the efforts of real-life athlete Béryl Gastaldello as she swims for Gold, she is simply one of the many millions of people travelling to Paris on their own for the biggest sporting event on earth. Her story is mostly unremarkable, yet it contains all the lovely nuances of life.
A Rohmeresque delight a lá The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986), Cadic’s film — developed from the similar-sounding short The Summer Holidays (2022), also starring Madec — is a sparkling, effervescent thing, bubbling with unexpected moments of connection and serendipity. And its lightness is its greatest strength!
It hangs on the naturalistic yet highly specific performance of Madec, playing a piano teacher from Normandy on a one-week holiday, making the most of a trip to the capital. She tends to have very bad luck: first, she is not allowed in the swimming hall due to her oversized backpack, second, she’s kicked out of the youth hostel after being a couple of days too old.
Unlike the Paris of the movies, where anything and everything can happen, she is in the real Paris I’ve heard from a million different anecdotes, the place where Murphy’s Law was probably invented. Still, these unfortunate events allow her to connect with her half-sister (the always excellent India Hair) and develop a genuine friendship with her niece Alma (Lou Deleuze).
Through simple yet effective scenes, the images drenched in the hot Parisian sun, we slowly learn more about Blandine’s life, including her failed relationships and choice not to have children. We get the sense that this trip to Paris is more than just about the Olympics. It’s also a chance to learn more about what she actually wants. But thankfully Cadic doesn’t frame her development in a series of rote conversations, instead chucking the poor woman into a series of genuine laugh-out-loud situations that would make Monsieur Hulot proud. Yet, somehow, Blandine is never the butt of the joke. Cadic listens to and develops her character with grace and care, making you truly root for her to find inner peace.
Nor is this film, as the synopsis suggests, mere nostalgia for the Olympics. A long-running thread is many Parisians’ distaste and active resistance to the event, including the forced removal of thousands of homeless people. There is little that French people, especially Parisians, can agree on, especially when it comes to politics — or matters of the heart. Blandine cannot even seem to find an equilibrium with her half-sister, or a potential love interest, Cadic happy to embrace the ambiguity in her increasingly complex life. But with a short-story-like approach to storytelling and characterisation, That Summer in Paris shows how a story like Blandine’s can be more compelling than the greatest athlete on earth.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.