Summer Storm

Tobi and Achim are best buddies and teammates on the school rowing squad, intimate to the point of wanking together, if not each other – a distinction Tobi is more than idly curious about, just as his feelings about Achim’s new girlfriend tend towards jealousy rather than envy. When the team departs for a summer camp-cum-regatta, the presence of an opposing squad made up of gay teens pushes Tobi into confronting his anxieties as the literal and metaphorical storm clouds gather. Although a novelty for German cinema, ‘Summer Storm’ is in many ways a routine if well-observed coming out narrative structured around familiar moments of tension, crisis and resolution. What marks it out is the explicit depiction of a present alternative to the atomised teen angst that often characterises such films: the tentful of gay blades across the way provides Tobi with a model of out life that isn’t dauntingly ‘other’, gratingly raucous or implausibly utopian. In fact, the story’s main strength lies in its characters who are marked less by their sexuality than by the romanticism and  selfishness of adolescence.