Fans of the Maysles brothers’ direct cinema classic 1975 documentary Grey Gardens will adore That Summer. Effectively a prequel of sorts, it too documents life inside the famously dilapidated East Hampton estate inhabited by idiosyncratic mother-daughter duo Big and Little Edie.
Göran Hugo Olsson’s (The Black Power Mixtape) doc is bookended by reminiscences by photographer Peter Beard of the vibrant, creative community he attracted to his Montauk house – including Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol (whose footage is used) and socialite Lee Radziwill, with whom he started making a film about Big and Little Edie, Radziwill’s aunt and cousin respectively.
Radziwill’s calm, elegant presence – protective of her relations’ dilapidated estate as it’s investigated by environmental health – is the perfect foil for the Edies, as insanely charismatic here as they were in Grey Gardens. The house itself is the same recognisably chaotic ecosystem (visited by raccoons and festooned with cats – one with “the exact same profile as Teddy Kennedy”, muses Little Edie), but this doc is arguably gentler and more nostalgic; with Radziwill exploring the family’s history and Beard, recalling the Edies’ idiosyncractic charm and the conversations they shared over the course of that summer.
