What an achingly beautiful film. Oh to be 17 again, and to experience such an idyllic summer of first love, first sex, and first heartbreak, in an charming Italian village, surrounded by cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals, with nothing to do but read, play the piano, ride bikes, swim, dance, and pick fresh fruit. And make love, of course. Never mind that it's 1983, and that the central love affair of the film is between two young men. These boys, and everyone else around them, seem delightfully insouciant about homosexuality. If there is even a whiff of stigma in their world, they're more self-conscious about being Jewish than they are about being gay. Their summer of discovery has only its own lovely complications, completely free of external worldly cares, as unburdened as the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves of the peach and apricot trees. The story is as fresh and as sweet as the just-squeezed apricot juice they drink, and the metaphor of summer love being as pure, sweet, and perishable as summer fruit pervades the film. You will cry tears of wistful joy when the summer inevitably ends. And you will never look at a peach the same way again.
Comparable to Brokeback in a beautiful portrayal of two men in a very rural situation stumbling onto a relationship without words or models of how it's supposed to work. Much is conveyed by the actors without a lot of words. (Which is good, because when some of those Yorkish people speak, it's scarcely recognizable as English. I wanted subtitles at times!) Outstanding performances. Bleakly beautiful Yorkshire Dales countryside. And some unflinching footage of farm life (imagine Tarantino doing "All Creatures Great And Small"). I'd recommend it. Some of the wordless scenes felt very authentic to me and took me right back to my own very early experiences (lying next to someone, pretending to sleep but not sleeping, desperately longing to make a move but not knowing how or if I should), while other minimally worded scenes with his parents seemed a bit elliptical or pat - how did they get to understanding or acceptance so quickly. Maybe that's just the Yorkshire way, working things out with very few words.
