The End of Summer
1964 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Michel Brault
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Adolescents spend a late-summer stay at a Laurentian cottage north of Montreal. The film lingers in the bittersweet awareness that childhood is ending and the lake days will not come again in the same way.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Brault refuses the melodrama of the coming-of-age beat—there's no crisis, no revelation, just the quiet demolition of a season—and that refusal is exactly what makes it sting.
A foundational text in the direct cinema tradition, where the formal decision to simply *remain* with these adolescents becomes an act of profound respect for lived time; the editing breathes with the rhythm of a day dissolving into memory.
The camera stays low, moving through the cottage with the kids rather than observing them, and that single spatial choice transforms the film from watching childhood end into *inhabiting* it.