The Cormorants

THE CORMORANTS   **1/2

Fabio Bobbio

2016

IDEA:  Two close preteen friends hang out over one long summer.

BLURB:  Fully evoking the term “lazy summer,” The Cormorants fills its runtime with, well, idle time. Mop-headed prepubescents Samu and Matte - presumably lightly fictionalized versions of the boys who play them - swim in the river, lounge in the sun, hang out at a mall and a carnival, and stalk the forest. Sometimes they bike. Like other boys their age, they talk about sex and are prone to spontaneous roughhousing. The passage of time is indeterminate; the sun sets and rises, but the kids’ clothing never changes, and their activities vary little. Applying many of the principles of slow cinema to the coming-of-age film while also folding in docu-fictional realism, Bobbio has come up with something simultaneously leaden and sensuous, totally aimless and yet often absorbing in its ambling youthful languors. Almost perversely vacated of incident or character development, Bobbio seems only to want us to relive the dilated temporality and affects of childhood, using his opaque but deeply physicalized subjects as surrogates through which to experience the textures of young (male) leisure and bonding. DP Stefano Giovannini depicts the look and feel of afternoon sun on skin with tactile precision; studying the boys’ lithe bodies, at rest and in scrappy, homosocial play, we are transported to a stage of relative disinhibition, of free movement and intimate exploration. If The Cormorants doesn’t just fade away into uneventful nothingness, it’s because Bobbio and Giovanni have captured something pure about their subjects’ dispositions, in the jubilant and seemingly eternal crest of their youth.