But even though they spoke of greater things, they weren’t adults yet.

~The Door into Summer

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

~David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-40

Someone once asked me how to best describe The Door into Summer, and the word that came to mind is “humid.” The film resides in that certain kind of summer afternoon where the sun is overhead and the clouds are beautiful, but the air is dense and heavy, as though it was so thick that you had to swim your way through it. The characters all feel the weight of imposing emotional pressure upon them, while their inner restlessness leaves their personal feelings practically begging for an exit, yet constantly being denied. Just as a humid day doesn’t need much of a push to make the rainclouds move in, the characters can only hold themselves back up to a certain point. And it’s when they move past the point of no return that the torrent of rain overtakes them, innocence lost forever in a swoon that is both visually gorgeous and morally grotesque.

At the film’s center sits Marion Fiesse, a handsome boy of Europe’s fixation with rationalism. Self-assured of his own mind to the point of nauseating, he always finds a reasonable justification for anything under the sun, even reading the “truth” behind his mother’s letter wondering if he’ll join her and her new husband over the summer recess. Though historically framed within a certain ideology, Marion’s personality lies in that uncomfortable teenage time when you are somewhat drunk on your own hubris, that you know everything there is to know and that you have it all “figured out.” Anyone who has been a teenager knows that such is never the truth, but it’s an illusion that we all become privy to at some point or another, and in our own way. After all, how could someone claim to be so rational, yet throw themselves into the path of an oncoming train to settle an argument? All the flowery, elegant words don’t change someone being fourteen years old.

(Marion’s inability to reconcile his own emotional feelings with his philosophical outlook leaves his heart in a weaker state than he believes. The more he and his friends cannot healthily confront their own feelings, the closer everyone comes to their personal doom)

But rationalism is wielded by Marion and his group of friends like an armor, for which Marion is its greatest knight. Adored by nearly everyone he encounters, he even has the affection of the school’s most beautiful girl, Ledania Francois. But for Marion, the concept of allowing any kind of emotion, and especially affectionate emotion concerning Ledania, to cloud his judgment or enter his life in any meaningful capacity is unthinkable. For as much as Marion might voice the illogic of the rules that govern the students during the summer, there’s one rule that he clings to more tightly than any other: the door to the emotional side of his heart is to be shut tight forever, never being allowed to let his “irrational” feelings see the summer light. Let them be repressed forever in the dark.

Beyond the foolishness with the train, the cracks in the façade begin to show. Marion meets Sara Veeda, a woman who expresses her thanks at Marion stopping the train, and kisses him. Marion is justifiably repulsed, but he cannot get the candidness of her kiss and comments to him out of his mind. In his blind lack of understanding in the ways of love, he is choked by the pouring rain and the oppressive humidity of his heart, swimming through agony until he finds himself suddenly in Sara’s home, nude and vulnerable. His rationalism, and the misogyny he held tightly onto to try and keep his feelings under control, bounces off her with nothing to stick to. Unable to run away and with no defense against her emotional current, Sara seduces him. Marion fashioned himself as an immovable object, only to encounter a force he found completely unstoppable. The door to Marion’s heart is violently opened, straight into—and into—Sara’s waiting body.

(Marion comes face-to-face with the reality that he is wholly unprepared for the world of sex and adults due to his own voluntary repression, held within the palm of Sara’s hand and consumed by her body and feelings)

Make no mistake about it – this relationship is not consensual, and even taking into account the time period of the story, this kind of relationship is more than enough to tilt a head or raise an eyebrow of any viewer who might be watching, if not worse. The Door into Summer acknowledges this to be the case, framing the entire story as a tragedy from its first minute and making clear that, as beautiful as Sara is, her presence sets the dominos in motion to bring about Marion’s final torment. The music, vocally seductive and wispy and with yearning timbre through its strings, oscillates between major and minor through mode mixture, revealing both the exhilaration and underlying darkness of the world Marion has entered. He falls into a vortex of feelings he has long since denied, now growing out of control in Sara’s hands, and at the cost of nearly everything else in his life. What was once important seems unimportant, from friendships to social tact.

Marion’s change does not go unnoticed, and his time with Sara causes the undercurrent of his friends’ own emotional qualms and struggles to also come out. With their knight having abandoned them, they too are thrown into a series of horrible collisions and tears, consumed by an all-encompassing heat that causes tempers to get frayed and rash decisions that defy any sense of reason beyond traditional notions of honor. Left in the wake of their troubles, they never learned how to reconcile them. Ledania, the most emotionally forthcoming and conscious out of everyone in the cast, can only watch the melancholic wheels turn and the humid air in the sad narrative sunset.

(The anime has splashes of intense art direction, often with striking tableaux or animated sequences in which the force of the story’s center commands full attention)

Perhaps the ending of the story could have gone differently if the characters were a little more forthcoming with their own honesty. Wondering about this though, I would argue, misses the point. The Door into Summer captures just how helpless people can be when at the mercy of feelings that they do not understand, or to be more precise, choose not to understand. It is a warning that feelings that arise from moving into the realms of love for the first time are both raw and powerful, compounded by their neglect. To repress them or pretend they don’t exist is to deny oneself not only happiness in the general sense, but a healthier kind of happiness rooted in emotional reconciliation and maturity. There is a dismaying irony in that Marion denied his feelings under the auspice of logic yet did not have the logic to realize that he should try and understand those feelings beyond simple dismissal. And because of that, with or without that encounter with Sara, one thing is certain – Marion’s life could only end one way.

But even though they spoke of greater things, they weren’t adults yet.

Indeed, they weren’t.