A Summer in St. Tropez (1983)

a wandering horse and meets its bearded owner, Renaud. A second encounter beside the water turns their mutual curiosity into romance, gently disturbing the women’s sealed-off feminine idyll without producing anything as vulgar as dramatic conflict. With no spoken dialogue, Benoît Widemann’s music, the rustle of the countryside, laughter and the movement of bodies must do all the storytelling. The result is less a movie than an hour-long reverie: hypnotic when Hamilton’s eye for hazy light and skin is working its spell, repetitive when yet another exquisitely posed tableau arrives in place of an actual scene. It is beautiful, unabashedly voyeuristic and emotionally weightless, yet its complete surrender to summer idleness can get under your skin if you accept the film on its own dreamy terms.

Released in 1983, it feels like the last warm breath of the permissive 1970s drifting into a brasher decade that was already losing patience with soft-focus innocence. Hamilton shot around his own centuries-old house in Ramatuelle, near Saint-Tropez, and the location supplies most of the production value: weathered stone, rustic bedrooms, flower-filled fields, quiet lanes, beaches, blue water and sunlight pouring through gauze curtains. This is not the nightclub-and-yacht Saint-Tropez of champagne-swilling celebrities, but a private Mediterranean hideaway where nobody appears to own a watch—or much underwear. Alain Casanova’s photography gives everything Hamilton’s familiar misty glow, as though the lens had been rubbed with summer memories. The vibe is languorous, playful and faintly unreal, somewhere between an art-house perfume commercial, a pastoral erotic fantasy and a very expensive home movie. Viewers wanting dialogue, tension or character development may start checking the clock; viewers happy to bask in scenery, music and naked beauty will find it an exceptionally relaxing little time capsule.

The female ensemble is not asked to deliver traditional performances, and most of the cast are credited only by their first names; Monica Broeke is the one familiar Hamilton face. Their job is to look natural while being meticulously posed, and they manage a convincing air of affectionate complicity—giggling, lounging, touching and wandering about as if the camera were merely another house guest. The women are fresh-faced, graceful and photographed with an almost obsessive appreciation for bare skin, tousled hair, translucent fabric and long limbs in motion. Nudity is frequent and often full-frontal, with shared showers, topless bathing, naked beach runs and sensual female contact, though the film remains softcore rather than hardcore: there is no graphic intercourse, just an enormous quantity of lovingly displayed flesh. Saucy, certainly; explicit by respectable 1983 standards, absolutely—but its real seduction lies in the lazy suggestion that paradise is an old French villa where the sun always shines and getting dressed is nobody’s priority.

David Hamilton doing what he did best, obsessively stalking 7 Gorgeous French Young Women on a Summer Holiday in Saint Tropez and creating a Dream-like Experience for all men.

In an isolated country house close to the shore near Saint-Tropez, seven young women share a bedroom. Over two days, they wake, shower, breakfast, play dress up, bathe in the sea, picnic, ride bikes, pick flowers, have a pillow fight, run on the strand, practice ballet stretches, groom themselves and each other, and laugh. Anne returns a horse to Renaud; the next day, he’s in a rowboat and meets her by the pier. By the film’s end, all are celebrating with the lovers.

Enjoy the Lush Locations, Hypnotic Cinematography & Beautiful Innocence of his Creative Imagination in this condensed version.