Summer Vacation 1999

This is every imagined childhood summer, and it focuses on those fleeting months when you had a crush on your most beautiful and unapproachable classmate. Three boys are whiling away their vacation in a deserted boarding school; a fourth has just killed himself because one of the others rejected his love. Then a newcomer arrives early for next term, and turns out to be a dead ringer for the boy who died. Is he a ghost? Or has the boy feigned his death and come back to work things out differently? Laying siege to the heart of the beautiful loner, the newcomer finally gets him to admit that he doesn't know how to accept affection; but this step forward unleashes jealous passions in the other two boys...Brilliantly original, Kaneko's sci-fi approach uses a lush visual style to evoke pre-pubescent feelings with great poignancy, but it also uses a precise, coiled-spring structure to snap everything into place. The result plays like a secret, stoned collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Alain Robbe-Grillet. But what makes the film truly remarkable is the casting: the boys are played by teenage girls.