Beyond the Multiplex

"Summercamp!": Memories of a precious summer (this one)
Whatever magic Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price employed to get so intimate with the young subjects of their documentary "Summercamp!," it's something most documentary filmmakers never get close to discovering. This is an unassuming little film that sneaks up on you; at first it seems like pleasant public-TV fare, a little ground-level time in the hothouse society of Swift Nature Camp in northern Wisconsin, where kids aged roughly 8 to 14 spend three weeks swimming, canoeing, horseback riding, doing archery and crafts, and eating tuna salad on hot-dog rolls. (That detail alone had a nearly Proustian impact on me.)

But the more time you spend with the kids of Swift -- with their tears of homesickness, their battles with counselors, their whispered late-night confessions and summer-crush friendships -- the more universal and even operatic their emotional world becomes. I don't think you have to be a middle-class American with summer camp in your own past to appreciate this film, though that undoubtedly helps. Of all the films, fictional or non-, that set out to capture the terrors and wonders of childhood and adolescence, and the treacherous borderline between them, I've hardly seen any that affected me this deeply.

Many Swift campers are profiled in Beesley and Price's film, but the directors seem especially drawn to the strange kids, the near-outcasts. Some of them thrive at camp, like the Chicago girl genius with a precocious haircut who says she dislikes human beings and is all too eager to escape her parents. Others, not so much. More and more, "Summercamp!" focuses on Cameron, an overweight, hyperactive kid who could be the juvenile hero of a Stephen King story, and Holly, a wispy blond who speaks in a nearly inaudible murmur and seems bizarrely obsessed with chickadees.

If you did attend a summer camp somewhere in North America, you'll be thrilled and mystified to discover that summer-camp culture seems essentially unchanged since, I don't know, forever. The skits and songs seem to be the same ("Kumbaya"! "Little Red Wagon"!), the counselors seem cool, sadistic and buffoonish in familiar ratios, and the lake water is still freezing. They serve lime Jell-O at Swift! As one counselor says to a kid whom he has compelled to say "sorry" to another: "Was that so hard? All you had to do was say one four-letter word. Um, five-letter word."

Cameron and Holly's stories are heartbreaking, and there are occasional indications that the world in which Swift kids are growing up has not remained unchanged across the decades. Many campers are taking ADD/ADHD medication -- although one counselor wryly observes that all-day outdoor activity seems to make the symptoms disappear -- and there's a casual self-consciousness about the adult world that seems new. One likable kid, discussing his workaholic lawyer father, calmly says, "It pretty much sucks for me. I'll go home and it'll be like I don't have a dad." When you ask yourself whether these kids will be OK in the end, the only possible answer is another question: Am I? Is anybody?

I wept more than once during "Summercamp!," but it's not easy to say why. Nothing terrible or amazing happens to any of these kids, yet watching them we know how closely they will hold these memories for the rest of their lives. Despite its unaffected manner, "Summercamp!" has something like a profound aesthetic vision; it calls up for the viewer the overpowering emotions of one's own childhood, while reminding us that others are feeling those same joys and fears even now, and will be hurt, disappointed and rewarded in roughly the same measure. This is a precious summer experience (with a perfect soundtrack of songs by the Flaming Lips), ephemeral as fireflies in the grass. Catch it before it's gone.

"Summercamp!" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Aug. 3 in Milwaukee, Aug. 10 in Boston, Aug. 17 in Lincoln, Neb., and Tucson, Ariz., Aug. 24 in Portland, Ore., Aug. 25 in Chicago, Aug. 31 in Los Angeles and Sept. 14 in Seattle. Also available on DVD.

"Live-in Maid": She has always depended on the kindness of ... servants
In closing, a few words on a film that deserves much more, the subtle and pitch-perfect social comedy "Live-in Maid," from Argentine writer-director Jorge Gaggero. Norma Aleandro, that nation's greatest living actress, gives a delicate performance as the noble if not entirely likable Beba, a middle-class Buenos Aires divorcée who's totally broke but can't quite readjust her expectations. She's slowly selling off the china, the silver and the jewelry, and as we gradually figure out, she hasn't paid her maid, Dora (Norma Argentina), in more than seven months.

Gaggero never stages big confrontations or explanatory monologues. What we learn about the blend of love, hatred and mutual dependency that lies between Beba and Dora we have to pick up along the way, by inference. If Beba, with her dithery manner and fashionable if outdated wardrobe, is the camera's main focus, then Dora, a block-shaped woman from the rural working class who gives nothing away easily, is the film's moral pillar. Both women, as we may eventually understand, are governed by pride, but in both cases the pride is complicated, unstable, mixed with pity and need and contempt. Both actresses do their work with body language more than words; they couldn't be more different and they're both amazing.

You could call "Live-in Maid" a comedy, and as the polarity of Beba and Dora's relationship begins to reverse there are certainly some funny moments. It's never sadistic or gratuitous in its handling of Beba's descent into the indignity of poverty. (If there's something of Blanche DuBois in Aleandro's portrayal, Beba never falls as far or as low.) But it's a wrenching, often painful comedy with its roots in Bergman and Bresson and Chekhov, as well as in the extremely unfunny condition of the Argentine economy. Not a shot or a sentence or a line is wasted. "Live-in Maid" surely won't get much play here, but it's exquisite, diamond-tipped filmmaking, further evidence of the fine work Argentina's artists are producing under extreme circumstances.

"Live-in Maid" is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with wider release to follow.

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