Infinite Summer had its world première at Fantasia 2024
Infinite Summer opens with a brief monochrome history of zoos, going all the way back to the oldest known zoological collection from Hierakonpolis, Egypt in 3500 BCE. Its main character Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock) works as a part-time guide at the Tallinn Zoo – yet the film is set neither in the past, nor even in the present day, but rather in the near future. Indeed, standing alongside Mia as she addresses a party of visiting children is Muki (Denise Moreno), a Robotical Artificial Intelligence (made to look like a giant cartoon chicken) who monitors and optimises conditions for the animal inmates.
Mia is on the cusp of change. She has just finished high school where she won the ‘best student award’, even if her considerable intellectual achievements are offset by a certain innocence – and she plans to spend the summer working through who she is and what she wants to do with her life, and generally “figuring stuff out”. Before Mia heads off to party with her friends at a lakeside holiday house, her father (Ivo Uukkivi), a successful if somewhat wayward artist, warns Mia not to do drugs as he had done in his youth, but it seems clear that Mia, on her estival rite of passage, is headed down a path of transgression. The swim that Mia takes in the sea before meeting her friends at the beach bar is also her first tentative dip into a wider, more overwhelming world of adulthood (later her older, worldlier friends will leap into the lake’s waters while Mia herself is left behind).
Mia’s best friend Grete (Johanna Rosin), two years her senior and more experienced, has just returned from a stay in London, and has an even older Canadian friend Sarah (Hannah Gross) in tow who regards the virginal Mia’s naïveté with a certain amusement, recognising that “she still needs to come out of her cocoon.” It is Grete and Sarah who keep trying to ply Mia with drink, and who encourage her reluctantly to join them in Extreme Dating online, even as Mia’s own sexual desire gradually awakens.
Through the dating app, Mia meets Ivo (Ciaron Davies), aka “Dr. Mindfulness”, a schlubby dealer (though he prefers the term “meditation teacher” or “guru”) who turns her onto a wired-up relaxation respirator mask – with attached gas dispenser – that he claims to have invented himself. “It’s like having your own personal yoga teacher,” Ivo says – and when, feeling left out by her friends, Mia tries it (“it’s part of my summer experience”) and has a hallucinatory trip, Grete and Sarah are quick to reach out to Ivo for their own go at the breathing device. Meanwhile two Interpol agents – silver-quiffed Detective Jack (Steve Vanoni) and his more grounded partner Detective Katrin (Katariina Unt) – circle in, trying to get to the bottom of a peculiar conspiracy before all the younger generation are lost to it.
This latest feature from writer/director Miguel Llansó (Crumbs, 2015; Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, 2019) is a coming-of-age sci-fi adventure set in a rapidly evolving world. Dedicated to Llansó’s own daughter Silvia, Infinite Summer stages the bewildered anxiety of parents seeing their children disappear into a brave new transhuman universe of AI, virtual communications, biotech, mutagenic drugs and technological singularity – a human zoo where everyone is both connected and caged together, where experience is communal and where love is one. Maybe the kids will be alright after all, but – much as Mia’s disapproving grandma (Anne Paluver) fails to understand what drives Mia’s dad – where these young folk are headed (out and up into the ether) is beyond their elders’ comprehension.
Bottling all the alienation, exhilaration and awe of adolescence, while also capturing where we are – and where we are headed – as a species, Infinite Summer is all at once funny and weird, mundane and miraculous, as it shows humans and other animals being locked into a higher plane of existence.
strap: Miguel Llansó’s sci-fi singularity follows a teen girl’s first steps into a transhumanist menagerie of young adulthood
© Anton Bitel
