A Summer in Brooklyn: Intimate Notes on a Blossoming Relationship

A Summer in Brooklyn is an intimate conversation between a blossoming relationship and a city blooming with life in the height of summer. This short-film, directed by John Cox and produced by his LGBTQ+ focused production company Americana Pictures, stars Oumou Eden Traore and Susi Plottes-Pineda as new lovers navigating the enthralling, awkward, and sensual onset of a lesbian relationship. The film introduces these characters as they intimately navigate the morning after; visuals of soft hands and hair carefully wrapped in silk convey a tone of budding intimacy as they lay bare their tender declarations of comfort with statements like “I slept so well”, spilled under an enveloping duvet.

Cox expands on this intimacy by following these characters through the streets of Brooklyn ;soft guitar imbues the scenery with a sense of possibility, as perfectly lined terracotta-coloured brownstones are peppered with sunlight filtered through trees, their negative spaces adding to the heart-bareing pulse of a potential love brimming. Cox’s camera guides the viewer through the city with a collection of organically romantic settings: park bench chatter, the lulling push-pull of bodies on the subway, a sun soaked conversation on the grasses of Prospect Park. These beautifully familiar settings allow the reader to connect with these characters - to relate to them.

The performances of both Traore and Plottes-Pineda provide us with intimate vignettes of this newly forming relationship. Through their body language and dialogue, they play with the inescapable tension of buzzing desirability and connection. Their dialogue mirrors the familiar anxieties of getting to know someone, where we are unsure how much to confess to the other about ourselves only to find ourselves pleasantly surprised when we realize they reciprocate these feelings and, as expressed in the film, “see” us for who we are. Their dialogue shifts from strained sentences to the hum of agreement- eyes follow lips sensually, soaking up every word, Traore and Plottes-Pineda symbiotically arrive at a place of comfort and familiarity. While sometimes the awkward tension in the dialogue shifts from hyper-relatable to strained and inorganic, the balance between the two is delicate and difficult to pin down, caught somewhere between intentional and the side-effects of inexperience.

As A Summer in Brooklyn is shot entirely on an iPhone, there is an underlying shoe-string quality to the film as it flitters between visual dialogue and the tension-wrought conversations between these two lovers. While I believe this technique speaks to the DIY sensibilities of Gen-Z, the use of an iPhone lacked a sense of playfulness.The colors and washed out whites of a phone production are easy to recognize, but lack innovation. What could have been an opportunity for Cox to lean into this unconventional medium confidently seems to have been disregarded in exchange for accepting it as a gimmick. Instead of playing with the angles, the interactivity of the medium, or pushing the envelope for this format, we see Cox utilizing familiar shot techniques that are commonplace for standardized camera set ups; such as the sky up-shots, half-framed face dialogue shots or the ‘walking out into the distance’ perspective that was popularized by John Ford’s The Searchers.

While this film doesn’t compare to more experimental iPhone film contemporaries, such as Tangerine by Sean Baker or Unsane by Steven Soderbergh, it does provide a beautiful portrayal of the beginning of a relationship devoid of any of the saccharin, over-sexualized context that so many lesbian relationships in film fall victim to. Soft, vulnerable, a little bit awkward but entirely swept up by the rush of it all, this film does an incredible job of allowing the seeds of a relationship to blossom and expand within the vivid landscape of Brooklyn’s city streets. ♦