THE SUMMER HOUSE: A MAN'S BI-SEXUALITY ENDS IN TRAGEDY

With the director, Curtis Burz.

MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL, August 29, 2014 – The Summer House, a new German film making its North American debut here, is the story of Markus, a successful architect whose unchecked bi-sexual desires end in ruin for two families.

Markus has liaisons with other bi-sexual men which he keeps secret from his wife and 11-year old daughter, who unwittingly idolizes him. But when Johannes, the young son of a close friend of Markus’s, overhears his father confess to Markus that he is having financial difficulties, the relationship between Markus and the young boy goes down a dangerous and ultimately fatal path.

Markus can’t control his increasing desire for the boy, but little does he know that he’s being manipulated by the sandy-haired Johannes, who is determined to help his financially strapped father. At the same time, Markus’s relationship with his wife Christine, who already had doubts about Markus’s sexual orientation, continues to deteriorate, although she tries to hold on to what is clearly a failed marriage.

Needless to say, this film doesn’t end well. In fact, the shock of the ending, which I won’t reveal, is so great that I initially felt that perhaps the director, Curtis Burz, had gone too far.

In a question and answer session after the film, I asked Burz, who also wrote the screenplay, what motivated him to make the film and what he thought the film’s message was. Burz, who in addition to being a film maker is also a practicing psychologist in Berlin, says he has encountered so many instances of sexual and intimacy problems in marriages, women who hang on to relationships far too long, and victimized children that he had to finally tell the story. The message of the film, he said, is that children need to be protected.

The Summer House is Burz’s third film. The running time is 95 minutes.

The cast includes Sten Jacobs as Markus; Jaspar Fuld as Johannes, the young boy; Anna Altmann as Christine; and Nina Splettstober (Altmann’s real-life daughter) as Elisabeth, Markus’s daughter.