An Unforgettable Summer

1925, Romania. Marie-Thérèse, the wife of an officer named Petre, turns down the advances of her husband's commanding officer. The answer comes quickly: the family is posted to a bleak and dangerous outpost on the Bulgarian border. Tension builds there, and in the end some of the local peasants are held for something they did not do. Marie-Thérèse tries to stand up for them. Lucian Pintilie's Romanian and French co-production is adapted from a chapter of a novel by Petru Dumitriu and screened in competition at Cannes. Kristin Scott Thomas takes the lead. The film does not present the violence on that frontier as one side being in the right; it shows the trap the husband and the wife are both caught in. The tone sets bright summer light beside hard events.