Natsu e no Tobira

A journey through MadHouse chapter 8: one of the pillars of shone ai.

The central theme of the film is the passage to maturity through love. The story is not limited to telling a common summer romance, it will use all kinds of love that its duration allows. The sexual awakening of a relationship between an adult woman and a teenager, a homosexual love, unrequited love and even a kind of a rather twisted love triangle. The story is made so that you question each of the characters and their actions. That the axis of the story is romance does not mean that everything you are ... going to see will be pretty as we are used to. Throughout the work you will see all the characters involved do both good and bad actions. In the end what matters most is what each character is going to learn from what they did that summer.

The story touches on many themes, which although they have been explored individually today, I am impressed by how brave the story was in touching on these themes in the 80s. I would like to address a couple of themes here so you know what you can expect.
The first theme would be the unfaithful relationship between an upper class woman and an underage teenager. For the time it may have been a common practice, but beyond the fact that the woman took advantage of the child, the relationship left him with more things beyond a broken heart. How to be loved but most importantly how to love. There are many stories about self-love but the fact that the work talks about how to love someone in a dangerous mental state is a message worth analyzing.

The other theme is the stigmatization of homosexuality in the time in which the film is set. It is not about showing us a romance between two men, it is about showing us the consequences of hiding this orientation so as not to bother society. Speaking from the religious stigma that being homosexual was being possessed by the devil, tells us a lot about the prejudices of society at that time. This homosexual romance does not come with the intention of giving us a happy ending in a time where they could not be. It only comes to show us how much times have changed and that it is now more accepted by the vast majority.

Natsu e no Tobira is a film that must be seen for two reasons: the first being its historical weight as one of the works that paved the way for modern shonen ai. The second for all the richness of the plot that it presents in almost an hour and a half of duration. When you finish watching the film, there will most likely be two or three topics that you will want to discuss with people who have also seen this beautiful film.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

There's a moment in the show where it says, "But even though they spoke of greater things, they weren’t adults yet."

Indeed, they weren’t.

Regularly scheduled disclaimer: I don't believe in the MAL rating system, so ignore everything but the overall score if you actually want to know my opinion for some reason.

Natsu e no Tobira is, like many films from this era, more interesting from a historical perspective (in this case as one of the earliest depictions of gay characters and perhaps the first proper BL anime). Unfortunately unlike films like Ashita no Joe in a similar position, its characters are lacking the core appeal they need to make the growing pains of anime as a medium more tolerable, and ultimate there isn't much to actually say ... about the film as a piece of art beyond its historical context. It is, at times, very pretty, but its style doesn't particularly convey a depth of character or an interesting enough aesthetic to really justify the existence of the film. None of the characters are necessarily unlikable per se, and I actually do think that thematically it is fairly interesting: an exploration of the passion of love and youth and the inability to rationalize them, the way neglect can prime people who think they know better for abuse, etc. However there's just not enough substance or nuance here for me to say that those themes are explored well.

To keep it short, this film certainly has historical interest, and isn't particularly long, so if you're curious about the origins of BL and want to observe fairly pretty art for a while, it is worth checking out. From a purely artistic perspective, though, it ultimately falls short.