Set during a sweltering summer, a surprisingly confident debut film about the forms of love that break us and put us back together.
Jean, a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy with a complicated life, caught in the countercultural whirlwind of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, an alternative rural boarding school for boys with “problems.” Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never found it easy to make friends, and school has never been a place of refuge or enjoyment.
Compton Manor is his last chance, but even there, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean remains marked by difference. The other boys pay tuition; Jean studies on a scholarship. They come from good English families; Jean’s mother, Rosa, is a German Jewish refugee, and his father is barely a distant memory. After breaking the rules several times, Jean is walking on thin ice. He just has to get through that summer: then he will pass the exams and leave.
Suddenly he befriends Tom, confident and charming, supported by years of good education and privilege, and it seems Jean’s world could change. When the relationship turns romantic, Jean falls into an intense and overwhelming love. He starts skipping classes to wander into the woods or cross moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering if this relationship could offer him a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear completely?
Hypnotic and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative about loss and escape, distilled into the heartbreaking story of a teenage love as intense as it is dangerous.
