Summertime (2015): The Lesbian Movie That Still Makes Me Cry in 2025
Hey queens, let’s talk about the one lesbian film that absolutely wrecked me and still lives rent-free in my head ten years later – Summertime (or La Belle Saison if you’re fancy). This 2015 French masterpiece is hands-down one of the most beautiful, painful, and insanely hot lesbian love stories ever put on screen. If you haven’t seen it yet, fix your life immediately.
Catherine Corsini directed this absolute gem, and she didn’t hold back. We follow Delphine (played by the ridiculously charming Izïa Higelin), a farmer’s daughter from rural France who’s secretly a baby lesbian dying inside because she can’t be herself in her tiny village. She runs away to Paris in 1971 and immediately falls in with the radical feminist crew – and boom, she meets Carole (Cécile de France looking like the hottest professor you ever fantasized about). Carole is this confident, outspoken, city lesbian who’s already living her truth, and the chemistry between them? Sweet Jesus, it’s electric.
The moment they lock eyes you can feel the lesbian tension crackling. And when they finally kiss? I had to pause the movie to breathe. The sex scenes in this film are some of the most intimate and real I’ve ever seen in a lesbian movie – none of that male-gaze nonsense. Corsini shot these scenes like she actually understands how lesbians touch each other (because surprise, she’s a lesbian herself). It’s tender, it’s hungry, it’s messy in the best way. You’ll watch Delphine and Carole making love in that sun-drenched farmhouse and genuinely forget how to function.
What makes Summertime different from every other lesbian film is how honestly it shows the push and pull between living as a lesbian in the 1970s. Delphine is terrified of her family finding out, Carole wants to scream her love from the rooftops. When Delphine’s father has a stroke and she has to go back to the farm, Carole follows her because that’s how deep this lesbian love goes. They try to build a life together in the countryside, wearing overalls, working the land, stealing kisses in the fields – it’s literally the lesbian cottagecore dream ten years before we had the word cottagecore.
But god, the heartbreak. Without spoiling too much, society in 1970s rural France wasn’t exactly throwing pride parades for lesbians. The way this movie handles internalized homophobia, family pressure, and the brutal reality that sometimes love isn’t enough… it’s devastating. I sobbed like a baby the first time I watched the ending, and I still tear up every rewatch. This isn’t one of those cheesy happy-ending lesbian movies (looking at you, Imagine Me & You – still love you though). This is the raw, real shit.
Cécile de France and Izïa Higelin deserve every award for their performances. Cécile plays Carole with this perfect mix of strength and vulnerability that makes you want to both date her and be protected by her. Izïa as Delphine is just… babygirl energy dialed to 1000. The way her face changes when she finally lets herself feel her lesbian desires? Oscar-worthy.
Also can we talk about how this movie is basically lesbian eye candy? The French countryside in summer, both of them running around in tank tops and loose shirts, sweaty from farm work, the golden light… it’s soft, it’s gay, it’s everything. I swear this film awakened something in half the lesbian community when it came out.
If you love lesbian period pieces (like Portrait of a Lady on Fire or Carol), Summertime belongs in your top 3. It’s sexier than Carol, more politically charged than Portrait, and hits harder than both combined when it comes to the ending. This is the lesbian movie that doesn’t give you the easy way out – it shows you the cost of being a lesbian in a world that hates you for it, but also shows you how beautiful and worth it that love is anyway.
Ten years later, Summertime is still the lesbian film I recommend to every baby gay who’s just coming out, to every elder lesbian who lived through the 70s, to every queer woman who’s ever loved someone they couldn’t keep. It hurts so good.
Watch it. Cry. Text your ex. Repeat.
(And yes, I will die on the hill that this is the best lesbian movie of the 2010s. Fight me.)
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