The Big Picture Maintaining friendships as an adult can be hard. Without the benefit of seeing your friends every day in the high school hallway or sharing a dorm with them in college, it requires more effort to keep in touch. This can be further compounded by factors like living a large distance from each other, working in various fields, or even just developing different priorities and interests. As you grow up, you can naturally grow apart.
'Summer Solstice' Overflows With Authenticity and Specificity For the sake of full transparency, I’m a cisgender lesbian with several close transmasc friends, which offered me a particularly interesting perspective and made this film highly personal. Queer people often have a specific language and way of interacting with each other — a unique bond and sense of community that emerges when they get together.
There are simply things that Eleanor — like me — will never be able to relate to: the particular brand of body dysmorphia that trans people can struggle with as well as the rewarding kinship that they can tap into due to their shared experiences, for instance. Summer Solstice allows Eleanor to go on a journey parallel to Leo’s, where she must grapple with the fact there are things about Leo she won’t understand — and things that Leo might not want to share with her because of that.
Summer Solstice is accessible to all kinds of people, and that’s due to the strong script, thoughtful direction, and Menuez’s subtle and charming performance. Menuez makes Leo easy to root for from the get-go, overflowing with patience, passion, and a disarmingly awkward charisma. He’s extremely likable, but he’s not an imperfect, untouchable pillar of morality either. Schamus allows him to have faults, letting himself be walked over at times and being short with Eleanor in others.